Working on burnishing here, and I keep running into a problem which I think is just a product of my own impatience: I can’t seem to get from a bunch of burnished lines to a fully burnished page. Here's a recent example:
You can see there are still a number of unburnished areas on the page. I use a giant cowrie shell to burnish, and often find that it “slips” and goes back into the line I’ve already burnished, rather than going over the unburnished bits. I suppose the paper will wear down over time, but I’m wondering if I need a different technique or tool for burnishing work? I’ve seen Vaishali use a wide flat burnisher that seems like it would overcome this, but I’m wondering if other beginning burnishers struggle with this too.
Ha ha, this is a delayed response, but when I looked at your video, I felt like a very lazy burnisher because my first thought was "whoa, I would be really PROUD of that burnish job!" :)
It's like lawnmowing - when you see the tennis lawns at Wimbledon you see streaks, because of the way the grass lies and the light hits it, so it appears stripy, but actually the entire lawn is mown. Does that make sense?
I think those streaks are fine by the way - that's a fully burnished paper and I think when you hold it up to the light, you see streaks one way and if you look at it from a different angle, you will see the streaks in another way. It's important to use all your senses too, so if you hear an area that is unburnished then by all means burnish that, but to me that looks like a fully burnished and ready-to-paint paper. You'll need to burnish later anyway during the painting process so no need to overdo it now.... it is not going to be calligraphy or ahar paper that needs to be super smooth.
My giant burnisher yes - is also good for a first burnish, but I inevitably end up using my stone egg because of the nice weight and also - since we cover most of the paper anyway, the streaks are fine. It could also be a trick of the light. Don't worry too much about what it looks like at this stage, worry more about what you actually feel - if you feel it's totally smooth everywhere then it probably is, and is just the light hitting it at different angles so you see some streaks at some times and others at other times which were hidden before.