Paipo's Stone Tikis - 1st Thread - Jun 06 - May 08

I See the problem, Your Hammer tool is not big enuf. You need to borrou,,,(Trumpet sounds and Drum rolls), PIG HAMMER...(Drums and cymbals Crashing with little bells ringing!) to the rescue.
Sorry about your loss.

A fantastic solution to the problem! Great work as usual!

Lil' Bumatay is awesome! Looking forward to seeing the jade eyes. I see you are using the correct tools to do the precision repair work on your camera, so new pictures ought to be posted very soon, eh? :P

Paipo, what everyone else said.... :)

Amy

Can you draw what it looks like? :)

JP

Bummer dude. My cell phone suffered a similar fate today.

Hey Paipo!
Bumatay is really sweet! He looks so dimensional from the front, but the side shows him to be a flat little fellar! Love the face on him! Benzart is right in saying that you make it look too easy!

On 2007-01-02 18:35, little lost tiki wrote:
Hey Paipo!
Bumatay is really sweet! He looks so dimensional from the front, but the side shows him to be a flat little fellar! Love the face on him! Benzart is right in saying that you make it look too easy!

This is fairly true for most of my pieces. This one is a little flatter than the mug design I based him on, but not too far off. It is quite a bit deeper than most of my stone pendants. Thanks to some pics posted on Ooga Mooga I had a side profile shot to use as reference which helped immeasurably, and this was something I checked constantly when carving it.

I do try to give an illusion of depth with my carvings without removing much material...more to keep the time and cost down (=affordability!) than wanting to cheat or make shortcuts. Keeping as much of the original pebble intact as possible appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities as well. (I am a definite follower of the "Truth to Materials" ethos!)

In other news, I'm pleased to say I have the use of another camera to keep the images flowing until I find a replacement for my late-lamented cybershot. I'll try not to wash the next one with my wetsuit after a surf.

Paipo, can't wait to see this guy finished. Happy news, that, about having a loaner camera to use. Now you can breathe again.

As requested:

Wow! The jade eyes really finish him off nicely! One of your best yet, Paipo!

Nice drawing. Those eyes are perfect, almost erie. If you don't want to give away trade secrects don't answer, but how did you mount those? Are they pegged in?

John

A Beautiful piece Paip'. The body almost has that ancient 'Vahine of Woolendorf' look.
Now Im going to ask the dumbest question of all (my apologies if you have already stated): What culture is Lil' Bumatay from..?

T3 :)

You make My Bumatay Proud! Beautiful hardly begins to describe this piece paipo.

BUMATAYFUL!
HOW DO YOU GET THOSE EYES TO STAY IN?
PEANUT BUTTER? :lol:

thanks Jen! He's definitely one of the 2 or 3 best out of the 19 I've done so far.

Johnny, 1/2 of the depth of the eye is recessed into the stone and epoxied. Same as any inlay really...I have lots of preformed stone and shell rods for jobs like this. They were originally going to be more flat/flush but I changed my mind at the last minute and went with the cabochon "bug eyes" as that is what Bumatay tikis are known for. They catch lots of light sticking out like that too, so they seem to glow.

Tama, Andres Bumatay was a mid-century US "Polynesian Pop" tiki carver of Filipino descent. There's very little info available on him other than a few mentions here on TC and in Sven's Book of Tiki, but his "bug-eyed" style tikis are very distinctive and have inspired many modern tiki artists. This is the mug design I based my carving on:

It's hard to see much Polynesian influence, but the sunburst eyes remind me of a Marquesan U'u club:

Benz, I'm glad your Bumatay approves....or did you mean Mr. Bumatay? Is he still alive? If not, hopefully his ghost approves of all the pieces his work has inspired.

Very nice finish. The eyes really set it off. Interesting connection with the club...

-Gman

The eyes set it off, nice :)

Hi Paipo -

The eyes on the club - are they little skulls? That's pretty cool.

They're little tikis like on the nose. COOL!

Hmm. What mystery project could Paipo be working on that has taken him away from us for so long? Come on, man, show us the goods!

Yeah almost a week without a post - I have just been getting some other stuff caught up, along with a few flat days where I haven't been up to much at all. I did go to a cool party on the beach where I get my stones, and got to hang out with a couple of very cool local carvers. Interestingly, one of them who is a pretty highly regarded Maori Trad/contemporary carver picked my bumatay as being Tahitian/Marquesan influenced!

Not much happening tiki wise until next week while I finsh off yet another order for a gallery. I did start on this little Australian black jade stylised U'u club:

Ooh, ooh...

T :)

Ditto what Tama Said.......

Hey that's pretty nice! Black Jade huh. Cool!

Did you find that on the beach, too? I can't wait to see that beach someday, in person.

Black is Beautiful my friend!
That club is SMALL! You must have Baby Hands! Can't wait to see more progress pics on this one! You are truly a master of minerals!

Thanks Tama, Benz, gap and llt...I don't get this stuff from the beach as it comes from South Australia, but I did do a prospecting trip out to the town where this stone comes from a few summers ago. I grew up in South Australia and get back every few years to visit the family.
They mine so much jade there that it's dumped in piles all over the place - they were using it as structural hardfill in the harbour! Each day I would go out and fill my backpack with rocks and go back to the caravan park and sort through it at night (whilst working my way through a bottle of rum with my cousins!) I manged to get about 25kg of rock through on my flight home without paying any excess (something that I always seem to manage when travelling overseas).
The whole thing seemed like a fevered dream - crazy high temperatures and humidity, a strange little town in the middle of nowhere, and jade as far as the eye could see, free for the taking. The video I shot is guaranteed to make any carver's jaw drop! I'm pretty keen to get back there - maybe next summer as I have a another trip to OZ scheduled for then.

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[ Edited by: Paipo 2007-01-10 12:56 ]

Wow! As far as the eye can see? Sounds pretty cool!

Video? In this day and age of the internet, is that available for us to see?

Yeah, and WHERE IS This Video. Put it up on mySpace, or Your space as it must be.
Imagine, Jade for fill. Lemme at it, Where is this town?

I don't think my video card has capture capability, and the vid is on a VHS tape - however, I have a lot of stuff that I really want to archive on DVD before the tapes crap out on me, so if I get it transferred I'll try to rip and post it. It really is quite unbelievable how little value the stone has over there.
Benz, that piece of black jade I sent you is from there (bought stuff, much better than what they dump, but still a couple of grades below the AAA), and the pierced hook I posted a couple of months ago is carved from the green stuff I collected there (landfill). Because I'm from South Australia I love using it (besides the fact the quality/strength is superb), but there are a lot of NZ carvers who won't touch imported stone.

On 2007-01-09 21:25, Paipo wrote:

I keep looking for an update on this one. These are hard enough in wood.

Now I may send you a postage paid box next time you go to the jade landfill.

JP

On 2007-01-10 12:52, tikigap wrote:
Wow! As far as the eye can see? Sounds pretty cool!

*Its all true! Ive seen the footage with my own two eyes & dont believe any doctoring had been done. In a field; truckload after truckload, tonnes upon tonnes... And sure enough our man is there plucking jade from the piles & again pulling it up from the lapping waves... Im sure I banged my head on the TV screen trying to get 'in', :lol:

**Along with my recent parcel of Wyoming etc, there was a DVD of a guy, Don Wobber, diving for jade in (Jade Cove? California??) in the 70's(?)... He & a few friends manage to recover a 9000kg(!!!) sea-worn boulder. Worth viewing Paip; when are we going to get you out here for Pisco & other tiki fun???

Tama :)

there's a few guys doing the jade diving up in norcal. it's butt cold. you need a dry suit. i surfed there a lot with a 7 mil winter suit on the surface.

http://www.norcaljade.com/

Cool link - thanks pdrake! (boulder #140 wants me to take it home, but Im about $1799 short... aue!)

*Pity there's no rough/slabbed stone available. Might be worth keeping an eye on...

T :)

Tama and I had a good night out on Friday at an opening of a regional exhibtion we're both involved with, representing 2/3 of the jade/stone carvers in the show (the other guy being a good friend of ours as well, and all of 3 of us were at rock school together! Go class of '02!)
Very little happening on the tiki front I'm afraid, as the shops continue to demand more contemporary jewellery. Still, I can think of worse ways of supporting the family and paying the mortgage. Encouragingly, a few have responded well to the tikis and have made some orders.
A little bit of progress on the U'u, and the start of a new project - a rarity in that it was actually pretty well worked on paper before committing to stone:

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[ Edited by: Paipo 2007-01-14 16:25 ]

Coming along nicely and the moai looks promising too :)

Paipo, I really love the lines on this guy. Can't wait to see him done! SWEET!

Cheers hewey and Benz - lines are courtesy of the ancients, with a little help from Wouter's excellent Rapa Nui travel pics.
Got the profiling finished - quite a tricky shape with all those burr-unfriendly inside corners:

Lookin major Schweet! great shape!

Wow Paipo!
I can definately see the influence from those pictures.
But, I gotta tell ya, this one is still my favorite!

Yes Paipo, he is a Tricky little fellow you have to make up rules for as you go. He will be a Really Sweet piece when he id done, I can Feel it . You will get help from the ancients!

There is a definitely a bit more thinking and preplanning with this one Benz. It will be easier being in profile, but the tricky bit is getting the depth to look right with less than half an inch of stone.
Heath, yours was totally winging it, which is why it's one of the best things I've made. Going from relief to in-the-round was a massive learning curve for me and he kinda developed under his own steam. I'm stoked you're still enjoying him!

I was meant to work on orders all day, but one of those deep omnipotent voices you hear in your head kept saying "FINISH ME"....(no, I didn't finish it)

This one is looking rather aristocratic. Nice lines.

Ok. That's it. I've had enuf. I'm throwin' my stone tools away.

Paipo! Man! That's just too much!
gap

[ Edited by: tikigap 2007-01-16 12:30 ]

I'm with tikigap, I'm throwing away my stone tools!
Well, actually I need to buy some first and then I'll throw them away!

Beautiful lines. Very nice work.

Benjamin.