Pigeons at Sunset: Easy Burned Wood Decoration Project

Sometimes I just play with old scrap materials to test some techniques to see how they work. Here I wanted to play with fire and see how that enhances the natural lines in the wood. I also wanted to see if I could trace a figure and used a pigeon for that.

In my eyes the result looks like two pigeons meeting each other at sunset.

It was a short and easy project, but I enjoyed making it and maybe you should give it a try too.

The photo shows a close up of a pigeon that I traced with a marker on a piece of board. The board came from an old piece of furniture and was painted light gray at one side.

The template of the pigeon came from a drawing that I made some years ago. I kept it and used it as a template for some of my recent projects.

If you cannot draw, you can use a drawing that you find online or on paper and trace that.

I cut the board on my band saw. Since the board was painted gray at one side, it would not be clearly visible on the gray table of the band saw, so I flipped it over for the photo.

I had some old slats of pine wood that already had an old layer of varnish on the wood. I placed the pigeon on a location where I liked it, based on the natural grain of the wood.

I used a torch and partially burned the wood. If you touch the wood with the bright blue cone in the center of the flame, the wood gets black very fast. If you hold the torch a bit further away, you have more time to see the wood change in color. I recommend that you try a test piece first to get a feel for it. It is absolutely not difficult, but a few minutes of practice helps in getting nicer results.

If you get a dark black spot at a location where you did not want it: Don't worry, it can be corrected (see step 6.)

When I removed the pigeon, I saw that the edged where a bit faded (first photo). I used a soldering iron and touched the wood with the hot tip to get a nice solid black line around my pigeon. On the third photo you see the result.

Since I was taking photos with my left hand while I was burning the wood with my right hand, I could not focus on both at the same time and that resulted in some really dark burned spots that I did not like.

I used a small wire brush to remove the dark spots. That was really easy and took just a few seconds.

So far I did not plan to do anything with the piece of board that I used as a template to cover the pine wood when I was burning it. But I looked at the back side and liked the looks of it. So I decided to glue both pigeons on a larger piece of white wood.

Here you see the result hanging at a wall.

Some years ago I used the same pigeon template and brushed blue paint from the template on wood. There I used many pigeons taking off in flight. It decorates one wall in our bed room.