Okay, I am still working on the tiki that is going to look exactly like that picture of me that is my gravatar… me in the cool shades… I am also trying to work on my disappointment that on the day I posted a bunch of silly pictures of Donald Trump, culminating in me sticking his head on various phallic images, I got 296 views, and that now, while I am sharing the story of me creating art from wood while simultaneously creating an illustrated book for little kids, my views since I started dropped to 140, then then 69, until today, which is, admittedly a weekend and therefore traditionally a slow day, and it is still early… but 19… seriously?
So far, I am really just at the point where I am trying to remove a lot of wood in order to leave the nose sticking out of the log as far as my actual nose sticks out of my face.
I tried using my little Dremel tool with a sander bit on it… and had two of the little, slip-on sandpaper covers break and go flying off… which is dangerous… seriously, I need to invest in real tools, because this hunk of wood is hard.
I decided to try a trick I read about somewhere. I made some saw cuts, and then used a chisel, in order to remove wood faster. I call this ‘moving wood’. The saw cuts prevent you from getting a split in the wood and accidentally removing something important… like my nose. The stick leaning against the log is what I use to pound the chisels through the wood.
I did measure how far my nose sticks out of my face so I knew how far down to go around it, but I got complacent. That big flat part above the nose was sort of supposed to be where my cool sunglasses were going to be. But when I did a few quick measurements, involving putting my fingers up to various parts of my face, and then moving them to the tiki without changing the position of my fingers, I discovered that my face is really much smaller than I thought it was. The sunglasses should be much lower down. Go ahead, measure the distance between your chin and your eyebrows, and between the outside edges of your eyes. Use your fingers. Look at your fingers. Your face, the main part, really isn’t very big, is it?
Yeah, that rectangle where I was going to carve my cool shades is way too high. I think it is because I am used to doing crazy tikis where I can out stuff wherever I want to… (seriously, just type ‘tiki’ in the search bar of my blog, and you can see the ones I have already done)…
So, I sort of marked out some of the places things actually should end up… using, as you might remember from the first post in this series, the expedient of putting that printed picture of me over the tiki, driving a small nail into the wood through it on certain highlights, and then playing connect the dots with a felt pen.
Hey, don’t worry, I left extra wood for just such contingencies… because I know I don’t know what I’m doing.
