This instructable is just to show others how you can create a beautiful bit of art on a piece of wood even if you haven't got crazy good artistic skills.
If you have, then this will be even easier for you.

Supplies

Essentials:

Pyrography pen (not ridiculously expensive, some are around £6 on ebay, but if you want your work to be made even easier id pay a touch more for one with adjustable heat settings. Mine was £30)

Wood (any piece of wood will do, some softer woods burn faster than harder varieties so do a test burn if you feel the need)
I used a hevea wood chopping board as it was reduced to £1.25 so it didn't matter if i screwed up

Pencil

Optional extra to make life even easier:
Carbon paper (the blue stuff you have in receipt books)

Step 1: Prep Your Design

If you can freehand a sketch on the wood then happy days, i however couldn't afford to do a sketch and have it not turn out looking good when i made the whole thing just to use as an instructable.
So this is where the carbon paper comes in.

Lay the carbon paper on your wood, then lay a printout of whatever you want to replicate over that.
Then using a pen or pencil, draw over all the outline and any significant dark lines/areas of dark shading until you are left with something similar to the last photograph.

If you dont have carbon paper, grab yourself a pencil and go for it. Personally i just draw the outlines and then burn them, then faintly draw the finer details and burn them too.

Step 2: Dark Lines

This is where the more expensive pyrography pen earns its keep, they allow you to turn up the heat to ridiculous temperatures which make your lines dark almost instantly. (My old pyrography pen was the ones that look like a soldering iron, and doing anything black took a lot of time going over everything multiple times)

Using the pen on a high heat (on mine its 7/10) which is plenty.
Draw over all of your outline marks and darkest patches until everything that is black on your design is black on the wood.

Tip - When burning large areas of pure black, to achieve a relatively even shade i will do small circles with the pen in a slow and steady motion.

Step 3: Slightly Lighter Work

For this i turned my pen down to around half way.

Either freehand burn the lines that are slightly lighter than the last lot, or use a pencil first and set yourself up with some more lines to follow.

While you are doing the lines, while your pen is on around half full you can use this for a little bit of the darker shaded areas too (small circular motions again)

Step 4: Last of the Lines + Lighter Shading

Set your pen to 4/10 and do the last of the lighter shaded lines, and the majority of the shading can all be achieved at this heat.
(If there are any areas needing really light shading i usually do faster circles and as i work towards the darker patches i slow the circular motion right down)

The beauty of this bit is that its not hot enough to burn too much and show any mistakes, and you are forgiven for any bad strokes you may do.

Step 5: Finished

Sit back, look at your new chopping board and think "i'm not using that, it'l get ruined" then stick a picture on Instagram for the standard 23 likes and a comment saying "make me one"

I appreciate that you cant just read this instructable and then automatically become a pro at pyrography, but what i can assure you is that if you follow it step by step, you will surprise yourself when you finish, and you will probably find it very therapeutic and pretty addictive.

Thanks for looking,
Please check out my other random instructables, i specialise in the random