Paul Corinchock staged a pysanky egg workshop recently at the Tamaqua Community Arts Center and assured the more than a dozen adult students, “anybody can do it.”

His encouragement proved accurate as the mostly female attendees decorated their eggs in all sorts of patterns and brilliant colors.

It was one of four workshops in pysanky that Corinchock has conducted. Sunday’s utilized washi paper which engulfed the eggs, as an alternative for the more intricate patterns which are coated in a type of wax.

Assisting Corinchock at the class was his wife, Liz.

Paul said he has been doing pysanky for 40 years before he met his wife. A woman taught him the art in the late 1970s. After that, he did the egg decorations himself.

“Now that I’m retired, I spend even more time doing this,” he said. He retired from the military and from working on the railroad.

The two types of pysanky taught are Japanese and Ukrainian.

The Japanese type involves applying Japanese washing paper to a chicken egg. Washi paper is made from the mulberry tree of Japan.

He said other uses for washing paper are Japanese origami and wrapping gifts.

Ukrainian pysanky goes back to about A.D. 988, he said. It involved decorating the egg and then coating it with a substance to preserve it.