She is concerned.

Hey! Long time, no talk to! I’ve got to reach out to you on FF when I get the chance.

So with woodburning, what you need is a piece of wood and a woodburning kit (Amazon has some for relatively cheap. I use this one: Wood Burning Kit, PETUOL 110PCS Wood Burning Tool with Adjustable Temperature 200~450°C, Professional Pyrography Pen for Embossing/Carving/Soldering https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QWVHP5B/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_vrWOFb9H64NH1 It’s not the best, but it works nicely).

Then you can either draw your own design on the wood with a pencil or you can put an image that you print out on paper on the wood, use this material to glue it on and make it not burn up on contact, and scrape it off when you are done). I just hand drew Luffy and Crocodile, so I looked at the Manga Volume 21 and 22 covers that have the pictures that I wanted and tried to emulate that. From there, it’s just the patience of tracing your work with the wood burner tool, and you can use different tips for it.

So here we have it burned onto the wood. You might want to go over certain spots again, but it’s mainly done. Then you take some paint pens and paint all the areas that you want. I keep the wood itself as the flesh tones so it’s things like the clothing. Certain areas (Crocodile’s jacket and Luffy’s coverings) were painted in multiple colors to try and make it closer to the source material. The last step that I do is take a thin sharpie and panel line all the burned marks, basically tracing it again. With that, you have your custom artwork that literally nobody else in the world has.

For me, the first few times I woodburned, I was afraid to turn it on too hot, as I didn’t want to burn myself. However, it meant that it was rougher to navigate through the wood. My first effort was Fraggle Rock’s core cast, which is okay but not perfect:

Look at poor Mokey.

But then it got easier and easier to add more details, culminating with my favorite design that I did: Tim Sale’s Two-Face.

This came out great. It’s a great way to kill stress and do something with free time, something I have a lot of now unfortunately. I made a post a few years back with other material I’ve done (and I’ve done more since, but they are for things like Baby Shark and Bubble Guppies... you know, the stuff my kids are into). But it also means I have my own copy of the cover @cyanideoreo​ made for A Gem in the Rough in burned and painted form.

Right now he is switching his bodies over and over again to move them forward in some kind of weird stop-motion walk. Whenever he leaves one body, he locks the joints, so they won’t fall over. His spark having to keep two bodies alive is severely weakened. Therefore he can’t move fast anymore at all.

in front of my energon