Each month inside Burn Club we run a Burn Challenge: BC+ members pick a single word, and everyone is invited to interpret it in their own way, in any style, any level, any tool.
This time the word was “ALTERNATIVE SURFACES”
and the winner is…
Des of Desi's Pyrography Inspirations
March's Burn Challenge asked members to step off familiar ground and burn on something other than wood. The timing was deliberate. Earlier this month, gourd artist Jenn Avery came into BC+ and taught a dedicated session on burning on gourds, which opened up a lot of conversation about what other surfaces might be worth trying. Members went in a range of directions. Des went to coffee paper and came back with something that barely looks like pyrography at all.
The piece is a Japanese-inspired landscape. A multi-tiered pagoda dominates the right side of the composition, its architectural detail rendered with fine linework across every level of the structure. A mountain rises in the background, its peak sharp against the sky and its base dissolving into a band of mist. Pine trees frame the left edge. A wooden dock extends into the foreground water, its posts reflected below. Birds cross the upper sky in loose formation. It is a complex, layered composition and it holds together.
What makes the piece striking is what the coffee paper does to all of it. The warm amber tones absorb the burn marks in a way that produces the quality of ink on aged parchment. The mist around the mountain's base is handled by leaving the paper largely untouched in that area, letting the natural variation in the coffee staining create atmosphere. Burning by restraint rather than addition (a technique that I learned in high school art class, working with pastels. This technique stuck with me and I would have never thought it could be applied to pyrography in such a stunning way). The unexpected tinting Des mentioned at certain temperatures is invisible as a flaw: it only adds warmth.
Des is a UK based artist working under the name Desi's Pyrography Inspirations. Her practice spans wood, leather, canvas, paper, and wood carvings, and she works frequently with reclaimed pieces and irregular forms, often building designs across multiple connected sections of oddly shaped material. Her philosophy around materials is genuine and consistent: she believes strongly in giving unwanted things a second life, and in treating the history and imperfections of a surface as part of the work rather than obstacles to it. This piece is a direct expression of that. Coffee paper is not a pyrography surface. She made it one.
Find Des's work:
Website: dpinspirations.co.uk
Instagram: @desi_pyrography_inspirations
To celebrate, Jen received all three Digital editions of
the Community Book of Templates.
Check out the Community Template Books HERE.
Give them some extra fire in the Burn Club and join us there for this month’s challenge. The April challenge is running now inside Burn Club, free to join and open to all skill levels.
To learn about the challenges before the public does, win some prizes and get burning: join us in The Burn Club!