Post #468006 by Paipo on Thu, Jul 9, 2009 10:44 PM

Grapa, Jen, seeks, Ben, big daddy - thanks! I have a few tricks up my sleeve to get that soft finish, mostly it comes from slow, careful and painstaking clean-up. The level of detail in the form of these last two meant that it took days instead of hours this time. As always, feel is as important as the way it looks, and the idea is for the unworked natural surface to be indistinguishable from the carved areas.

So, yeah, I went back on my word (again!) and took Kae back to the bench for eye surgery. I loved the stone band that made the "pupil" as it was, but on this style of tiki you have to follow through the whole way, and it just looked unfinished with that big blank area. Yet another session, more hours added to the massive tally, but this time....IT IS DONE! phewwwwww

I thought I'd better downscale my next project,as my patience for mega-tikis has well and truly run out for the time being. Started this little fella which is a remake of an earlier design, but he ended up taking ages too! I can't win! I couldn't get a good pic of this one no matter how many I took - trust me, it looks much better in person. The stone is very dark, more or less black, with a slight metallic tint. Guessing it's composed of some type of very hard mineral sand. During the roughout it was virtually impossible to see what I was doing with the water on it, along with it being extremely hard, so the cutting was slow. What was meant to be quick and easy became challenging and time-consuming.

The tongue is a natural jade pebble - here is a shot of it in situ before I picked it up :

The big argillite pebble Kae is carved from was picked up on the same walk, and possibly the black stone above too! (Gets a little hard to remember when you have thousands of 'em lying around).

[ Edited by: Paipo 2009-07-10 00:01 ]