Always willing to try something new, a while back I noticed that several people on the Woodburner's forum had tried to burn paper. I decided to give it a try and here are my results. First, I was told that I should use water color paper. This paper is thicker and heavier than both regular paper and poster paper and doesn't have the high clay content of poster paper. Then, the next step was to soak the paper in cold water for 10 minutes. I didn't know why, so I did one without soaking it. I found out that the paper has minute ridges that become very obvious when burned if it hasn't been soaked. Evidently, the soaking allows the paper to puff out like a sponge and make a more even burn. So it is very important to soak the paper before burning. The watercolor paper I used was a medium weight 140 pounds cold pressed, which is a medium grained paper. Finer grained paper is available. Then you have to let the paper dry completely. I transferred the patterns before soaking the paper, but you can do it after it dries. Next you burn just as you would burn a piece of wood. I have been told that you should use a higher temperature than for wood, and judging from the pieces I've done I think that must be true because I wasn't able to achieve a very dark color on any of my paper burns. But I could not get my burner any hotter, because I do not have a variable temperature burner. I have a Walnut Hollow burner, so that's what these were done with.

I noticed several things I really liked about burning on paper. First, there was no smoke or smell. This is a real advantage in our house. Second, there was no wood grain to have to deal with, so the burns were easy and fast. Third, there's no sap in paper!

But despite the advantages, there are also several disadvantages. For those of you who have tried it, burning on paper is similar to burning on leather. It isn't very forgiving. If you make a mistake, its there. You can't scratch it out and redo it. Also, shading is much harder to do than on wood. I don't know if it was due to my lack of ability to increase the heat on my burner or if it was a function of burning on paper itself, but I found it was easier to do an image of lines than one with much shading. However, shading is possible, as you can see from these pictures.

The first column is the traced pattern, the next column the burned picture, the last value is the amount of time each burn took.