It's kinda hard to tell in these pictures but what I did is cut every single grain with a knife to make ridges (this took like 2-3 hours total) then I took a fine tip sharpie to it. Since the sharpie is in the ridges it doesn't get on your hand at all. You may be asking "why the heck would you do this to a perfectly good ken?" Well my friends, I just so happened to sit on it and it snapped in half. I wood glued it back together but it just want the same, so I decided to be creative. This was my first time so the lines are pretty choppy,but if I do it again I'll probably be a bit better. I'm kinda bummed that I'm done though because of how fun it was, so do you guys think I should do something with the maple? I mean, if I could turn it all black that would look epic, but I'm not sure how I could do that. Anyone have ideas or thoughts on this dama? Anything helps, positive or negative, even though it looks pretty cool to me. **this is a Sol OG walnut stripe**
You've got way more patience than me. Looks cool. The way we protected areas we didn't want to have color when we glazed ceramics was by using wax. Maybe there's a way you could apply beeswax then dye the ken then heat it up to soak in the wax and reveal the uncolored parts. Actually you could probably wax the whole ken after you dye it and use a blowdryer or something like that to melt the wax into the wood. Alternatively masking tape but I'd be afraid the coloring compound would go under the edges of the tape too easily.