4. Texture

You've now produced objects on the plywood that are convincing! There are good outlines and shading to show where the light is coming from, but we need to let the observer know what the objects are made of! Probably your last exercise, like mine, was made of china and metal which is smooth, but what if it was rough? How do you make your surfaces look woolly, feathery, hairy, grassy or prickly? This is what is called texture and it makes the viewer really think the wood surface is made of grass, feathers or fur.

Using the pyrography machine we can make all sorts of lines and shapes. By using a range of temperatures and by moving the point across the plywood at different speeds we can imply a surface which is not wood. For a prickle have the point linger on the surface of the wood and then draw it away gathering speed. Do that a thousand times and you've got a hedgehog!

How Many Surfaces Are There?

Examples of Rough Texture :-

Nodular, knotted, rugged, crisp, gnarled, unpolished, knurled, cross-grained, craggy, scraggy, jagged, prickly, sharp, leafy, feathery, tufted, hairy, bristly, hirsuite, bushy, fringed, downy, woolly, corrugated, crinkled, plaited, thorny, spiney, granular and wood-grained.

Examples of a Smooth Texture :-

Polished, glossy, velvety, silky, glass-like, ice-like, burnished, flat, even, slippery, oily, level and shiney.

Exercise 4

Collect as many different surfaces as you can : wood, stone, feathers, prickles, plants, oranges, nuts and fur. Divide your piece of plywood into 8 squares and put 8 different surfaces into each of the squares. Do just a small area, no outline is needed. Ask someone to identify what each surface is!

Now try a hedgehog! Use tracing paper for the outline if you like.