Tales of a Pysanky Virgin

Last year I was introduced to the Ukrainian art of egg decorating, Pysanky. Since our group didn't get together this year for obvious reasons, I thought I'd share the ones I made last year.  Note that even though I used the traditional methods to decorate my eggs, they are not an accurate representation of this traditional art form in the least.  Pysanky eggs are created by alternating applications of wax  drawn with a kistka and dipping the eggs in dyes going from lighter to darker colors, then warming the wax and wiping it off to reveal the whole design.

I thought traditional Pysanky eggs looked too intimidating.  I'm not good at symmetry or uniformity, so I went and did my own thing.

I will say, having looked very closely at more than a few eggs trying to figure out my failings, I was surprised to see a lot of "perfect" designs, had flaws.  I'm not saying this to knock the artists, nothing will make those eggs anything less than the incredible works of art that they are.  I'm pointing this out because it's easy to look at someone else's work and see nothing but perfection and then look at your own work and see nothing but the mistakes.  If you're an artist, I know, that's what you do, but knock it off.  If you try this, cut yourself some slack, have fun and roll with the mistakes.

I don't have enough knowledge to write a tutorial, and I couldn't do better than what's out there.  I don't even have enough experience to say what's a great source of information, everyone seems to have a slightly different way of doing things. If it's a site dedicated to Pysanky, and there are many out there, it's probably written by people that have been doing this for decades and it's as good as any for a place to start.

What I'm prepared to offer here is a few insights from a Pysanky virgin's point of view and a few examples of non-traditional eggs. For instructional purposes I will be pointing out all my mistakes.

This was my first egg.  The dying process was blue, then pink (making a purplish blue), then black.  You can see fingerprints (bottom pic, center is the most noticeable) where I accidently touched the egg bringing it out of the first dye.  Human skin is gross and oily.  Wash your hands thoroughly when handling eggs, even when cleaning the eggs to prep them.  Don't apply lotion or hand sanitizer to your hands they will leave a residue. Really try to handle them as little as possible. And have a paper towel handy when you lift the egg out of the dye so you don't have to grab it to keep it from falling.  And watch that you don't set the paper towel on fire with the candle flame you are using to heat your kistka.  I'll say that again because it's really important, don't set paper towels on fire, especially when doing the final wax removal.

After you heat the wax in the kistka, make a test mark on a scrap piece of paper.  If the wax doesn't flow, it might not be heated enough or the kistka might be clogged.  If it flows too fast, you'll be thankful that big blob is on your paper and not your egg.   Test again until it flows evenly.  Do this each and every time you heat the wax, because the one time you don't, you will ruin your egg and consequently you're entire existence. No you won't, just keep going and pretend you meant to do that and most people wont even notice. Also regardless how careful you are, you might still end up with an uncontrolled blob, this life. (Bottom pic, left upper corner, big blob that was not part of the design)  The people using electric kistkas didn't seem to have this problem, but again too limited exposure on my part to be making any definitive statements.

It's helpful to sketch a design on the egg with pencil.  The process of removing the wax usually also gets rid of most the pencil lines.  But you can see here the marks on my spider's eyes are still visible.

In my limited experience, it seemed in small areas or thin lines where there wasn't a lot of wax to remove, the pencil marks were more prominent. I also found it's best to draw very lightly with a regular pencil.  I love my mechanical pencils but it was hard to write lightly with them.  The rough shell against the thin lead, left a lot of graphite in it's wake.

No you can not wash or rub the marks off a dyed egg.  The dye will rub or wash off also.  If the pencil mark is on an area that's been left white you can carefully try to remove it, but you might muck up a dyed area in the process and ruin your whole day.  A lot of things about Pysanky can ruin your whole day, such as the fragile state of eggs in general.  It is still a worthwhile pursuit, that can be fun as well as rewarding.

Here I tried making a few highlights on my web by randomly picking lines to cover with wax before the egg was dyed.  Obviously it just looks stupid and I should have made the whole web red.  What I discovered later is there is a whole other method Dryapanky, where you dye the egg and then scratch off a design.  I think that would produce the highlights I was hoping for but I haven't had a chance to try.

I found that besides doing a rough sketch on paper, doing a rough sketch in color was very helpful in trying to figure out the order different elements of the design needed to be waxed.  In the sketch I started with a black outline and then added details.  In the dying process, black will be the last color so you have to work backwards.

The hardest part was the black lines for the eye.  Doing that in the negative was obviously really difficult for me.  I wish those lines were much bolder. Also since the cat and the outline of the eye  were the only black components, the rest of the egg needed to be covered in wax.  You can see all the places I missed.  I think it works with the design, but I learned later a trick for covering a large area is to tip the wax out of the top of the kistka and smear it around.

Both images are on opposite sides of the same egg.  The order of colors for dying was white, yellow, orange, red and black.

The skull egg below is my favorite and it's just one egg with three designs.  This is the top view. 

For this I sketched my skull drawings on paper and then used graphite paper to trace them onto the eggs. You can see a lot of graphite lines are still visible on the finish egg.  The skull's were covered in wax so they would stay white, although I really liked the look of the soot infused wax and kind of wished I could've kept them like that.  Then the egg was dyed yellow.  The flower details where hand painted with dye.  Yes, you can do that.  And then the flowers were covered in wax.  This time I used wispy strokes of wax to cover a large area on purpose, and that's how I achieve the look of the top and bottom of the egg.  Then the whole thing was dipped in black.  

If you like my little egg stand it's a gold Lego dish on top of a clear inverted radar dish.  Fancy.

This last egg was done pretty much the same as the skulls.  All the small details are hand painted.  Doing that may require multiple applications to get the saturation of color you want. The only two colors the egg was dipped were blue and then black. 

 Yes siree, spring is just bursting forth from this egg.  

The biggest thing I haven't figured out and was hoping to work on this year, is what to do about the insides.  Technically you don't have to empty the eggs.  Over time eggs will eventually dry out, unless they leak or explode.  Adds a level of excitement you weren't expecting right? I liked working with full eggs because they sink to the bottom of the dye and once the inside is dry you will have a fully intact egg.  I followed these guidlines and every single egg eventually went bad.  Luckily none exploded, they only had small leaks.  But small leaks can make big stinks.

The other option is to empty the egg, either before or after dying. There's pros and cons to both and then there's the issue of varnishing them, but I don't have experience in any of that

Or maybe I did find the best method of preservation, pictures.  Because you never have to worry about pictures exploding or leaking noxious gases.