Post #680937 by Gene S Morgan on Wed, Jun 5, 2013 8:40 PM

ALERT !!!! WARNING!!!! My next series of post in this thread will seem to go on forever. Being of advanced age I can only hope I live long enough to finish it. I don't usually go this long with a thread, but there seems to be some folks reading these post and I hate to disappoint an audience. I have not had a lot of feedback, but that is OK with me because I don't always answer questions so good. As always some of the very great artist here kindly checked in on what I was doing and left nice comments. A few other folks have come around as well. Of course those young kids who infect all forums on the web jumped in trying to bully me with silly immature attempts at insults. I'm old and life is too short to worry about young folks trying to get attention. I have been pretty careful here trying to not talk about my attitudes about modern tiki culture. They are different than most others here at TC. My goal is to present things that I have learned to others and let them decide if they are useful. I'm for sure no expert on anything but I try in my own way to contribute to the common good in society. And, TC is a society I feel it is worth contributing to.

So I'm still here. Usually my ADD kicks in before I get this far in a thread, and I go looking for squirrels. But, what can I do, I'm still getting more than 100 hits a day. There must be some of you folks out there who like getting bored. It must help you sleep. I have one last series of Ipad painting post left in me. It will be a long one because I plan to try to cover all aspects of the Sketchclub interface and show as many painting tricks I can think of. OK, just more of the same …. Hope you can get something useful out of it. This is the tiki we will be working on ….....

This image is one of my early tiki t-shirt designs. Oh man, is the tiki police gonna jump on me with both feet? The strange thing is this is one of my most sold designs. I have never really tried to market my CafePress designs here on TC. I came here mostly to learn and have had lots of help from some of the great artist here. Lots of folks in the forum have visited my online shop but, as far as I can tell I have never had a sale from anyone here. I expected that because I knew that I did not always follow the tiki design rules that this community adheres to. Lucky for me that there others folks who buy my stuff and like my goofy designs.

I felt it was important to try to get at least a general accepted tiki image. I have captured a bunch of reference images, some from books and websites, but most from artist here on TC. I did not do this to copy other folks work but get inspired. So many cool artist are here. There are examples here from everyone from the fantastic work of Robert Jimenez to great sculpts by LakeSurfer. It is easy to find inspiring work on this forum.

As always I start with a shape. You may wonder why all my tikis are straight on poses. As I have said before I am not an artist, but I do design t-shirts and other products. (My web store offers everything from tote bags to coffee mugs) I think simple images are best for multi-use and size products.

Let us start with the mouth. A popular mouth type is big with lots of teeth. I have never been sure if that was as tiki as most folks think, but it is a cool way to make the mouth stand out.

This great painting by Robert Jimenez shows the advantage of a a big mouth. It adds so much to the overall expression that you are really drawn to the image. I like the size of the teeth and the fact that you only see the uppers. Make a very distinctive image.

You gotta remember we are not copying here, just trying to get inspired. Look at lot of different examples …... If you want to make great art you have to study great art …. Study, study, study …

OK, here we go. First, just by using two fingers on the Ipad you can move or zoom in on your canvas. By zooming on one area of your image you can concentrate on one feature at a time. We chose a color, in this case a much darker brown. You can see at the top center of the interface we are using the sketchy pen. It draws a kinda uneven less than perfect line. The slider on the lower right shows that I have it set at maximum darkness and the one on the left determines the size of the brush or pen. Just rough in some simple lines. The dotted line down the middle of the image indicates that I have the mirror feature on, so I only have to draw my lines on one side and the program does the rest. Thank you geeky computer programmers for thinking of that great tool.

It is important to note that at this time you are just sketching. You don't have to worry if your lines are not perfect. This is only the first step and there are lots of tools in this app to help you smooth things out later on. I purposely made the upper teeth bigger and curved the tooth line down for the fun of it. This is a funky version of common tiki mouth.

A few more lines at the chin line to add some interest to the face.