Here is my most recent tiki head carving. This particular head took around a week to carve.
The first stage was to mark out the mouth, and as I had decided on an extremely wide mouth, a large amount of wood would have to be excavated. I marked positions for the teeth and top of the tongue. Once I had established the depth of the mouth and the top of the tongue, I knew where I could remove material.
I used my chainsaw to carve out the majority of the mouth cavity to just within my guide lines, and then used the chisels to define the tonge and teeth. I then carved out the remainder of the mouth cavity with the chisels to a smooth finish.
I marked out positions for the nose, eyes and forehead. I had also marked out 'steps' of reducing depth of material around the eyes and mouth. These were approximately 10mm wide. These were drawn on and the outer line was my marker for deepest excavation of material. I then set about removing the material with chisels up until a satisfactory depth of excavation. I used the depth under the brow and around the nose as my guide for desired facial depth, but decided to excavate deep due to the extremely deep mouth cavity, which I felt called for a more extreme carving of the face.
I used chisels to remove this material which was the most time consuming part of carving this tiki, and then returned to the marked out 'steps' features around the eyes and mouth, and carved each step down to their graduating depth.
I then carved out the insides of the eyes, which I burnt subtly with a pyrography pen to give the tiki a more piercing, deep stare.
Lastly I marked out and carved the sweeping curves of the furrows in the brow. These furrows I designed to reflect and balance the contours of the 'steps' around the eyes and mouth.
Finally, after sanding the piece, I applied a graduating wood stain, firstly staining the tongue a slightly lighter shade, leaving the teeth without stain, and then applying darker stain to the remainder of the head. The lips and eyes are stained subtly darker than the remainder of the head.
