Pyrograph (Woodburning)

Going way back now.  I did this woodburning portrait for a friend around the late eighties.  The children in this picture are grown up now.  In those days woodburning was my passion.  I worked on commissions, doing portraits of dogs, cats, other family pets and people.

As you can see from this old newspaper clipping I was much younger then.  My tools for the woodburning portraits were an electric soldering iron and any old scraps of birch plywood.
I stopped doing these pictures when I came to realise that over the years two things happened that were affecting the finished works.  Over time, the scorch marks made by the soldering iron gradually bleached out, especially the lighter tones.  I found that even natural daylight was doing this.  The other thing that became a problem was that the birch plywood became darker as the years went on.  Some of my earliest works had disappeared to a shadow.  Couldn't find a solution for this problem, other than locking them away in a dark cupboard.
Pity about that, as they were so unique.