A customer with a garden Tiki bar asked me to create three stools, each with a different expression, and each in the style of a Tiki-head, with a painted finish. The only Tiki-head I’d tackled before was the 5-or-6ft one I’d made for the Bamboo Door bar in Sheffield (see earlier posts), but unlike that one ~ which involved laminating giant plywood sheets ~ these were pretty straight forward.
The heads were good fun to carve, and interesting too ~ obviously there’s not much realism going on there, and the faces are made up of a lot of symmetrical shapes and patterns. They looked nice enough as bare wood, but once the paint was on it really accentuated the shadowed areas and brought out the character of each piece.