by Monica Raye
That’s it! I’m burning my ukulele.
I’m a pyro, as in “pyrography”: the freehanded art of decorating wood with burn marks. I’ve been a pyro for two years now.
It started with me posting on Facebook ‘I’m burning my son’s guitar’, which resulted in replies asking what he had done to tick me off. My son moved out and left me his electric guitar to be creative with. So I stripped it down and burnt it. It came out looking so nice that I didn’t want to send it to him. So I burnt an uku to match. Unfortunately, it’s a cheap ukulele-kit you can put together. I chose maple leaves as the design because it represents Canada, it’s on our flag and we love our maple syrup eh. It’s home.
Step one is drawing and burning the outline. As you can see, even my little work table fell victim to my pyrography. I decided to continue the design over the edge, giving it a fuller view. I did have to clean the tip of the tool to keep it clean and give an even line. I continued the design to the back. It looks fuller in my opinion. The tool I had been using was just the wand, but I was just experimenting with it at the time. I found that just using the one tip felt easier to me.
To shade and get the darker effects I moved my tool slower not stopping. For a better burn I have to continue cleaning the tip. I also discovered that if my burn was too dark I could use an emery board to sand it lighter. When I got to the open area, I just made smaller movements back and forth to create the wavy effects. I added a couple leaves to the head. I ordered a wooden fretboard since the kit had a plastic one. When it came in I decided to burn it too. I just couldn’t help it.
Once my ukulele was finally finished I
added a leather cord to it as a strap, added small feathers to the tuners and named it Autumn. I didn’t use the strings from the kit but got better quality ones and used a lowG. My hubby made the stand for Autumn
and it sits on a shelf in my living room
beside my other soprano ukulele.
I got my inspiration from people like Dino Muradian, James Roberson and other artists that I found on Pinterest. Dino Muradian lives in Hawaii and actually is living his dream burning ukuleles for a ukulele company. Now that would be awesome to do. So if there’s any ukulele companies that would like me to burn for them I would be thrilled.