Skills

Pyrography skills comprise embellishment, carving with irons, fine drawing, drying, and applying colors. Pokerworks largely look dark brown, light brown, ancient, classy, distinct and pretty. Their unique rugged textures present considerable relief effects. Having applied colors, they will create even stronger artistic appeals. To add brilliance to the splendor of the traditional pyrography, we might use chromatically saturated pyrography and color-stemming pyrography. As a result, we might adopt different skills according to the themes of artistic creation. We might apply colors, either light colors to formulate simple and elegant styles, or heavy colors to generate strong decorative effects.

Patterns of expression

There are even more patterns of expression, from Buddha pearls less than one centimeter in diameter, to long scrolls extending several meters or dozens of meters, and to large-scale frescoes in halls. They are represented by Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival, Grand View Garden scroll, and the Great Wall. The works might fully display various styles of traditional Chinese paintings, such as landscape paintings, fine brushwork paintings, paintings in impressionistic manner, portrait paintings, New Year pictures, calligraphy, oil paintings, and abstract paintings.

Pokerwork themes

Pokerworks are continually enriched and innovated on the basis of inheriting traditional designs and colors. They largely tell about classic tales, mythical stories, auspicious patterns, and landscapes. The designs look fresh, charming and elegant, and never fade.

Tian Yutian, a folk artisan

In recent years, Tian Yutian, a Chinese pokerwork artisan, has committed himself to developing chromatically saturated pokerworks. He has been delving into the art to carry on the tradition. Tian was born in Xuzhou, East China’s Jiangsu province. When he was a child, he was fond of calligraphy and paintings. In the 1970s, he was apprenticed to Qiao Junsheng, former president of the Xuzhou Chinese Painting Academy, dedicated to learning traditional Chinese paintings and calligraphy.

In 1979, he was enrolled into the Xuzhou Yan’an Chinese Painting Institute, serving as a full-time landscape painter. During the period, he taught himself in the Chinese Calligraphy and Painting Correspondence University. Tian has been a member of the Chinese Folk Arts Association, and turned into a famous folk artisan and pokerwork artist. In 2001, Tian was admitted as a student of Hao Youyou, the founder of the modern pokerwork art. He learnt from Hao on modern pokerwork knowhow, and was highly recognized.

Chromatically saturated pokerworks

Pokerworks on wooden boards are made with different brand irons. It is imperative to properly control temperatures, and express tones of the objects with the extents of carbonization. The major tones are light brown, dark brown and black. These tones look exquisite when burned onto bamboo and wood carriers. However, in these days when people raise increasingly diversified demands in cultural life, these works look wearisome.

In order to inherit and promote the pokerwork art, Tian Yutian, who has always been fond of the pokerwork art, made bold innovations on pokerworks. After years of meticulous studies and repeated practices, particularly in response to traditional pokerworks’ deficiency in colors and lines, Tian invented the technique of combining layer-based coloring with repetitious ironing on wooden materials, so as to penetrate heavy coloring into the pokerworks.