Real-life paper birch

I was looking up if it’s possible to draw / write on the white birch bark. It is! People have been writing on it as early as 1st century CE in what is now Afghanistan, and also used in India, Russia, Finland and Estonia. [source 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript ]

My favourite one has to be the drawings made by Onfim, a boy of around 6-7 years old who lived in Novgorod Republic (now part of Russia). See image #1. He even drew himself as “a beast with a long neck, pointy ears, and a curly tail. The beast either has an arrow with feathers in its mouth or is spewing fire; one of the accompanying texts says “I am a wild beast”. [source 1]

Onfim’s writing exercises inspired me to try to write and draw on birch as writing exercises for ASLwrite. So I decided to order white birch bark sheets! I bought it from sellers in northern Quebec, who are a father and a daughter. They sell items they found in their expeditions in nature. https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/Borealistic#about

See image 2.

I set out to play with some sheets that might not be ideal for final products.  Here’s what I discovered. See image 3.

I have old clay tools from my grandma. I thought it’d be great for scratching into the bark. I played around with different endings of the tools. I found that ones with more blunt endings are better as the bark can be fragile and rip easily.

Pencils worked great on it, especially softer ones like 4B. Harder ones would just rip through the layer(s). I have to draw gently to avoid ripping through.

I tried pen- works great, but I feel it’s too strong / pops out too much. See image 4.

I also tried a gold pencil. It worked great with bringing in a bit of warm brown.

The brown markings were from using clay tools. Grey markings meant it was drawn with pencil.

On the bottom left of the image 5, you can see a tree with leaves falling. These are actually coloured pencils, but I found that colours don’t show very well on birch barks. Interesting.

Also, sometimes with a lot of pencil drawing, it becomes too reflective / metallic, making it harder for me to see it, and I had to move bark to reduce light reflection. So it made me consider carefully how to shade / darken without too much reflections. I played with a dark brown pencil and it works better.

I practiced shading with eyes in the middle of the bark in the image #5. I ripped through the paper, and tried to fill in, but didn’t succeed. It is harder to have consistent shade, but that’s okay!

So, on the middle bottom of the image #5, I played with the idea of drawings on top layer (white bark) interacting with below layer(s). Both persons are holding the edge of white, acting as if they’re pulling the white part away to reveal the brown layer.

I tried to see if I can lift up one layer without ripping it apart, so I can have it as a ‘flap’, and draw beneath. But, as you can see, the guy next to the tree had a chunk ripped away. It is indeed very fragile.

Yet, the drawing / writing impressions on the bark can be preserved for thousands of years. It is both fragile and not fragile!