Post #230400 by Bay Park Buzzy on Wed, May 3, 2006 10:30 PM

Tiki adventure #16:
After my last effort, I found out that I needed more room for the body. So on this one, I gave myself a whole four or five inches more than I did on the last one. That was a reasonable amount, but I will still need more room in the future if I want to do it better. The biggest challenge that I gave myself on this one was in the design of the mouth. I wanted the lips to be connected in the front and the mouth behind it to be hollow. I achieved my objective and was quite happy with the results on this one. I also wanted to make a more realistic and correct body on this one too. To do this, I made the complete body, front and back.
It started out just as all the others do: as a log. This was another Mexican fan palm, around 30 inches tall and eight inches in diameter. It's the one on the left:

Whole thing drawn out

face close up

body close up

I started out by carving the head. I was still doing the whole thing once and then going back and deepening the areas as needed. I would soon change this method and carve as deep as necessary the first time. Back then , I was still learning how deep everything needed to be and it usually took a couple of tries before I got it to look the way I wanted. For the mouth, I wanted the lips to touch and not be separated. To do this, I tunneled in from both ends and met in the middle. This picture was taken right before the mouth was carved hollow.

Here is the whole body after a first going over. It looks a little rough at this stage and will need further refinements

Here it is after the second going over. It looks much cleaner here than in the last picture and looks almost done.

It's hard to see, but the mouth hole punches all the way through with the front of the mouth still connected

Despite my careful measuring, somehow the "V" on the crown was off. It was centered on the front, but off by about 3/4" on the back.

The misalignment of the V on the head created problems on the back of the figure. Since the point of the v was not aligned on the back, the details down the back were out of true alignment too. I had to warp the details a little bit to make them appear correct. It is hard to notice it now unless it is measured or pointed out. This was also the first true 360 degree figure that I made. This picture shows the anatomically correct features of the back:

Here it is after the carving was completed and a light sanding was done:

Now he is waiting to be sanded with his other buddies

The biggest problem area for me on this one was the arms. They do not seem to be made the best way possible and look as though they were thrown on as an afterthought. I'm still working on making better arms to this day. This picture was taken right before I stained it.

this was another very nice looking piece of wood, so I decided to just use clear shellac on it

Here it is after a couple coats of Zinsler clear shellac

What I learned on this one:

1. I should have used a chainsaw on the first cut for the crown. I actually used a two inch wide chisel and it left it kind of rough looking and tore apart some of the fibers. The chainsaw would have left a cleaner cut.
2. Chicks dig tikis with butts.

[ Edited by: Bay Park Buzzy 2006-05-16 08:51 ]