Folk Art Wild Rose Walking Stick-Tip of the Day - Photos

I have painted the leaf detail on the folk art walking stick over the weekend.  When you look closely at the detail, you can see that they are primitively painted.  However, when viewed from a distance, such as if you stopped to speak to someone while out walking with the stick, the detail gives the appearance of direction and motion to the leaves.  If you were to see the stick in person, you would really notice the difference.  Without the detail the leaves look flat. 

Unfortunately, the resolution on these photos hardly makes it worthwhile to post them.  The difference is really quite hard to see.  The top two photos are of a section of the walking stick with the leaf detail painted.  The bottom photo shows a section before the detail was painted for comparison.





The design on this walking stick is quite small.  The flowers are only one inch wide.  The leaves are about 5/8 of an inch long.  The small size of the design made it fairly difficult to wood burn and paint.  I counted how many times I had to reposition the wood burning tool to follow the design on one flower (122 times) and one leaf (24 times).  If that same figure held true for all the flowers and leaves on the walking stick, this walking stick would have 6,758 individual wood burns on it.  It would have been a better approximation if I had counted the amount of burns on several flowers and leaves and taken an average, but how long do you want to keep counting for somethin that is not really relevant to the project.?

Tip of the Day:  When wood burning a design with a repeating pattern, it is important to make the depth of the burn consistent throughout the project.  Differences in the depth of the burn will be very noticeable.