Tutorial : Pentacles Part 2 - Make It Fancy

First, please read this disclaimer. Thanks!

Now that you've created your pentacle shape, you have to decide whether you want your pentacle to be simple and clean, or all fancy.

Let's assume you want to make a fancy pentacle. Here's how I, personally, find it easiest to create the design.

First, decide what sort of design you want. For the example, I'm going with the theme of "abundance." I've chosen to decorate the pentacle with crop plants, specifically beets, wheat, and grape vines.  Since this design is for a client, and I have to get the client's approval before I start working on the wood, I'll be creating the design on paper first. You can work on paper or directly on the wood. If you choose to work directly on the wood, however, you must use a very light touch with the pencil. Frankly, I would suggest working on paper first.

Start by transferring the dimensions of the wood piece onto the paper.You can do this with a compass and a ruler, or you can use tracing paper to trace the pentacle you've already drawn on the wood.

Since my design will be extending beyond the pentacle itself, and down the curved sides of the wooden disc, I've added extra guide lines around the outside.

The guidelines you choose to use will depend entirely on the design you choose to create. If you don't already have a good idea of the design you want, you may find it useful to start drawing first, and add the guidelines afterwards, to help you clean up the final design.

Next, start drawing your design. If the design repeats around the entire pentacle, you are only going to draw one small portion of the design.

Is your design going to be symmetrical around the line between the star's points (the edges of the design will meet inside the star points)? Then you'll want to create your design in this space:

Examples of symmetrically repeating designs are below:

My design, however, is going to repeat asymmetrically.  It's not something I do often, so I don't have many examples. This is a good one, though:

You can see that the pattern repeats, but there really isn't any "center" because the design isn't a mirror-image of itself. It flows from side to side. It's also a little more complicated to do than a symmetrical, mirror-image pattern, but the principle is still pretty much the same. If you can do one, you can figure out how to do the other. :-)

For the asymmetrical design I have in mind today, I'll be working primarily in this are of the pentacle:

There's going to be a bit of overlap on the edges when we transfer the design over (the areas in that funny green color), and that's fine. We'll work in that green overlap area to make sure the design connects all around the pentacle. You'll see what I mean when we get there!

First, sketch in your basic concept.

Here we've got beets, wheat, and grape vines loosely sketched in.

Next, use the tracing paper transfer technique to make the design "repeat" around the entire pentacle. You don't have to have a lot of detail at this point; just general shapes. The exact details of using tracing paper this way can be found in this blog post.

Doesn't look so great yet, though, does it? Take some time now to clean up the design and add important details.

Looking better. But we're still missing the details that will make it "overlap." So, tweak one part of the pentacle until the pattern "fits together." So you can see what I've done, I've circled the "overlap" portion of the design:

 

 You may have to modify your design a little bit to make it all intertwine. In this case, I had to get rid of the right-side grapevine. The vines all now branch out of the left-side vine. 

Use the tracing paper to transfer this new addition to each side of your pentacle. 

There you go! Now you can clean up the design wherever you need to (it's never perfect the first time around, and you'll inevitably have to tweak a curve here or a leaf there).

At this point, you can trace the whole thing and transfer it over to your wood.

A word of warning, though: it's tricky to transfer designs onto curved surfaces. If your wood has curved edges, you will probably have to hand-draw that portion directly onto the wood.

The next section will deal with actually burning your pentacle! We'll talk about what tips you should use, what heat settings are best (if you have that option on your pyrography pen), and how to achieve some nice shading.