HAUNTED TIKI MASK

I admit it's not really haunted, but when I say it to people they spend more time looking at it. HE HE! It's about 42" tall by 21 1/2" wide. I found a bunch of scraps of mahogany at work so I saved them. When I accumulated enough I glued them all together into a large panel. I put my longer pieces in the center to make the feathers. The size of the scraps dictated the shape of the tiki mask.

I never planned on wearing it, but I went ahead and hollowed out the back side to make it less weighty. It wouldn't be a very good mask anyway since there are no eye holes.

I painted it with acrylic paints. I used bright colors like red, yellow, white and orange. After the paint dried, I brushed Minwax "Early American" stain onto it, and then quickly wiped it back off. That gave it an antique look. The teeth were painted with bright undiluted white paint, and then after staining they look old and weathered, with dark in the pits of the grain.

I thinned down the orange and yellow paint for the feathers with water so the wood grain would show through.

The background is made from river cane. I thought it was skinny little pieces of bamboo but it's not. I bought a bag of it at a craft store. I captured it all inside a frame of bamboo pieces I split in half on a bandsaw. All of it is glued to a 1/4" thick sheet of plywood. I tied the corners together with grass they use to make hula skirts.
Seems like lots of tikis I see have teeth completely encircling the mouth all the way around rather than a top and bottom row.

Maybe tikis are decendents of lamprey eels.