Post #684009 by tigertail777 on Sun, Jun 30, 2013 5:00 AM

It's a bit late, but I did tell my sister what you said Littlegiles and she appreciated it. :)

I have been doing quite a lot of non-tiki art in the new studio, but last night I started my piece for the cannibal art trade which is a shrunken head carved into bamboo. I had a few larger size pieces of bamboo left from the build and thought it would be cool to use them somehow for the art trade. I also had a dremel tool I originally purchased to carve tapa designs into some wood details of the tiger hut, but never found the time and the brand new dremel was pushed aside. I have used a dremel before for other projects when I was younger (cutting eggs in half to make Fabrige style jewel boxes among other things) but I have never really carved anything hard before. The only stuff I ever carved was super soft like soap... well I DID try to carve a wood stick with a jack knife once, but gave up on it. So needless to say this was pretty new territory for me. I was really concerned that bamboo might get crazy splintery on me, but it really didn't do too bad in the department.

First I drew a sketch of a shrunken head after doing a lot of research (and I never want to see photos of cannibals again thanks so much for that nightmare fuel, Google).

Then I started carving with two different bit heads I had. I really needed another one for smaller finer details, but had to make do.

I tried to carve as deep as I dared without going through the bamboo wall. This made a hell of a lot of bamboo sawdust which is super fine I really should have been wearing a mask but I expected larger bits like wood has.

Then the plan was to woodburn the fine details, but I could only find my crappy hobby burner I've had since I was a kid. A good wood burner should allow you to do softer shadowing with the tip so the burning can have varying degrees of a light burn or a dark one. As you can see here it was pretty much all dark like overly burnt toast.

This was not turning out how I envisioned and was getting less confident by the minute with the carving and burning. So I thought it would help bring out the details if I gave it a light wash of acrylic paint. I really should have stopped at the wood burning stage. Part of being a good artist is knowing when to pull back, or stop and sometimes I just don't know when to do that. Forgive the photo it also shows some non-tiki trading card size art I am working on based on old arcade games, but I thought it would be kind of neat to show my reference sheet and my cookie sheet I used to mix my paints.

It's probably time to clean that cookie sheet and start over with my paints.:roll: I hope this project turns out better by the time it's done. Right now the results are disappointing. I guess we will see later if the fat bamboo sings. :wink: