Shagimaw Country

This is a burning I did for  Dry Kye Rustic Furniture out of Oakland, Maine. It’s on a nice piece of pine which is going to be used for a tabletop. The piece of wood came from where there was a crotch in the tree so I used those rings from where that huge branch was as ripples. I really let the grain of the wood drive the composition for this piece. It’s something I don’t often do but enjoy doing when I get the chance and it really made sense for this piece in particular.

This is the first of what will hopefully become a slew of burnings I will do to accent the work he’s been doing. Check out the array of things Eben at Dry Kye Rustic Furniture has been whippin’ up.   www.drykyerustic.com

Here are my two newest burnings, both are original designs. I hate the sharks on the shield/sinking ship one but what the hey….

This is another burning I just finished, its another one taken from a Sailor Jerry design. I took pictures of every step of the process, showing the changes I made to the design.

Here’s one of my newer burnings, I just made it the other day. It is taken from a Sailor Jerry design. I changed quite a bit of it though. One I am trying to do right now is take a design and change certain lines and elements of it so that it starts to become more my own.

I don’t have a lot of faith in my drawing ability when it comes to drawing without a reference. I have only been doing these burnings for a year and before that I never drew anything, except for a required drawing class in college. I still don’t seem to be able to draw unless it is in the form of a burning which is funny to me.

By altering existing designs more and more with each burning I can see that I am getting more comfortable with drawing more from my imagination than from a reference image.

This piece is a re-design of a tattoo I got a few years ago, I love my tattoo but I just wanted to play with the subject matter and composition in a burning/design of my own. I actually glue ribbons and stuff on the tree on Christmas which has been a tradition of mine for the last two years.

The pine tree and north star are both symbols of Maine. The banner reads “Dirigo” which in Latin means “I Lead”, which is Maine’s motto.

This is my newest burning, I just finished it yesterday. There were several firsts with this piece. This was the first time I used my shader to create an image, which is how I did the hunt scene. I have always done the outline and then shaded in afterwords as I showed in an older post. This is how I did the skull.

This creating an image with the shader made for more of a realistic image and was more like a traditional drawing method. I have always been terrible at that kind of drawing but I think this piece was a huge step forward for me, and using both approaches to drawing in doing one piece really highlighted the pros and cons of both.

This piece was the first one I put my true makers mark on. I had been playing with another mark on some other burnings but found that it had more or less been done before. I had felt like it wasn’t original enough but when I saw an almost verbatim mark by another artist I knew I needed a change.

This new mark seems to be exactly what I needed. It has the pine tree and north star which are both symbols of Maine that are on the current state flag. The way I use them in this mark are how they were displayed on the original Maine flag. The mark also shows the date the piece was created and has my initials, lettin’ ya know I made it. 

Beer Cozy and business card holder, both hand sewn leather. The image on the Cozy was burned on with my wood burner.

The business card holder is my own pattern I guess, I’ve seen similar stuff though. I made ten of them in two days, all hand sewn with different kinds of leather and different colors and no two were the same, I sold 5 of the ten at this months First Friday Art Walk, which is were on the first Friday of every month the art galleries and museums in Portland open their doors for free and everyone walks around seeing art and eating complementary cheese and crackers. Its a pretty awesome thing for the city and the galleries to do. This was the first time I’ve done anything for it and I definitely want to do it again.

I need to get some better shots but here are some pictures I took of a skateboard I made with a friend, Matt Gardiner about four months ago now. We vacuum pressed it on a mold Matt made for some of his other boards, the same mold we used for the squid and whale board. It’s seven plys of walnut and cherry veneers, with cherry for the center, top and bottom layers. The shape was made to reflect old cruiser boards as well as the shape of a ship.

I did the burning which is a more detailed version of a previous burning I had done before on a piece of maple. The gradient was achieved with a butane torch which worked a lot better on the maple than it did the cherry. This was the first time I revisited a design and it was actually really nice to see how much I have improved in certain areas, and what areas I still need to improve in, I’d say its definitely an informative process to try.

There are some other shots of this same board on Colleen Caron’s flickr page, you can find them here, Board details, and to see the other board me and Matt made, click here.

These are a straight razor case and small sheath, hand sewn with different kinds of leather. I bought the straight razor for $2 at a yard sale last summer. It was in rough shape but I cleaned it up and it looks pretty good now, it was made by Wade & Butcher out of Sheffield, England. I use it for more of a utility tool than for shaving but it’s handy. I’m tempted to do a burning on the handle but something about the plain wood is just too nice to touch in my mind.

The knife I got for a $1 and change at Liberty Tool Co. in Liberty, Maine (the greatest place on earth). It was probably made in the mid twentieth century by a Nepalese soldier, check these wiki links out for some sick history about the knives and the people who made them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukri

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurkha

Here’s some of the leather work I’ve been doing, this is a pipe case and tobacco pouch, the pattern’s for which I just made up off the top of my head. I didn’t have any strong thread at the time that I liked so I used floss which is actually amazing for this stuff. The button on the tobacco pouch has a banner under the crest which reads “Spectemur Agendo” which is a Latin motto meaning “Let us be judged by our acts.” Which I did not know until I finished the pouch. Kinda ironic.