STRATHCLAIR — Howard Hogg sits down at his desk. He opens Microsoft Publisher, and points to the computer screen.

A girl’s face looks out at him, through the pixels. Hogg points to her and explains that there are almost no lines on her skin. No wrinkles on her cheeks, no crows-feet around her eyes — her skin is smooth.

It presents a problem for the artist. When he needs to trace her face and draw it, he has fewer distinguishing lines to work from. Smooth skin offers fewer anchors for the artist. Shading will be important to get her face right, Hogg says.

The 70-year-old has been commissioned to draw the girl on a piece of wood art. Her grandfather requested the art, asking Hogg to erase the face of a woman in a wolf-headed hood and insert the girl’s face instead, in place of the protagonist.

It’s a multi-step process, and Hogg has begun the first step. He has started to draw the girl’s face by hand. His document in Microsoft Publisher lets him compare how accurate he has been. When he’s happy with the final sketch, he traces the drawing onto wood. Finally, he will burn it into the canvas using a red-hot pen.

Wood burning is the main technique of the Strathclair retiree today. In his shop, he spends most of his time using a pen that is heated up by electricity to burn marks into wood surfaces. The drawings go onto cutting boards and other pieces, depicting images like cowboys rounding the corner in a barrel race, or faces of smiling community members.

It has become difficult to do his other style of nimble, delicate “intarsia” work, he said. His fingers are less co-operative today, so it’s harder to cut dozens of small pieces of wood and glue them together over hours.

“My finger gets numb. And you’re trying to hold a piece and it falls to the floor,” he said. “And you pick it up and it falls again.”

With his abilities changing, Hogg nevertheless continues his woodworking craft. He has pivoted styles to spend more time on the wood burning technique, but plans to do a few intarsia style works in the future.

When asked why he chose woodworking, especially of people’s faces, he described that it’s something that challenges him. It is hard to draw faces, especially in the intarsia style of work he has reproduced dozens of times, where he creates a person’s face by assembling pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.

“I love challenges,” Hogg told the Sun. “You got to be pretty exacting when you’re doing this. If you move people’s noses, people notice.”

For the recent commission, to put the girl’s face in an artwork, Hogg said he will use two main tools. He said the job will centre around a fine-tipped wood burning pen to get the lines of her hair, and a shader to mimic her face, which is absent of lines and wrinkles.

Work starts at 5:30 a.m., and stops when his wife gets out of bed, he said.

When it comes to selling, there’s not really a market that pays fairly, Hogg said. He joked that people would think he’s crazy if he asked for payment equal to his time invested.

While he brings his pieces to shows like the Strathclair Fair this month, and to the International Peace Gardens next month, sales are just a benefit of the hobby, he said. He likes to be creative, and many of his pieces hang in his shop, under oil paintings he finished before moving onto woodworking.

When he visits markets to showcase his work, he puts a modest number on the price tag and accepts that people just don’t have that much to spend, he said.

For others, the work is priceless. He laughed as he recalled how a widow wouldn’t part with a piece depicting her late husband. Howard made a new one for his shop wall, where it hangs among many friends he has known in his life.

»cmcdowell@brandonsun.com