Burning and shading

Start with the outlines. Hold the pen like a thick pencil, rest your hand on the wood and pull the stroke toward you where you can. Use light pressure: the tip should glide, not plough. The burn gets darker the longer the tip stays in one place, so speed is your control. A blob at the start of a line means the tip landed before the hand was moving. Land moving and lift moving.

Shading is done cooler and in layers. Turn the heat down, use the flat of a shader tip and pass over the area several times, letting the tone build from pale tan to brown. Circles, short pulls and dots each give a different texture. Trying to reach the final darkness in one hot pass is what leaves blotches and hard edges. How to shade starts with a practice strip.

Follow the grain when you can and slow down across it, because the tip wants to jump between soft and hard bands. Clean the tip whenever it starts to drag or the line turns patchy. When something goes wrong, a light burn can be sanded or rubbed out with a sand eraser and a dark line can be scraped with a blade. Fixing wood burning mistakes sorts the fixes by how deep the burn is.

Ready to move on when: Lines are even in width and color, shaded areas change tone smoothly, and every pattern line has been burned.