Birthday Tiki of the Month

Celebrate!

The Tiki of the Month for February is a birthday cake tiki! Because someone around here has a birthday today. I won’t say who it is, but I hear he is celebrating the big 2-5 today. Or maybe those digits should be in another order.

I remember some years ago when word got out that Disney would stop having big celebrations for their characters’ birthdays because putting that number out there made them sound old, which could make them sound out of touch. I am starting to see the wisdom in that. So maybe you should just ignore those numbers up above.

Also, Laura and I sometimes discuss the ages of our teachers in high school. We thought they were so grown up and mature when in reality many of them were still in their 20s. And one of the oldest teachers that we had, one that we would have considered “old”? He was 48, which does not seem nearly as old as it did when we were in our teens.

Age is relative, depending on which direction you are viewing it from, I suppose.

Therefore we do not despair, but even if our physical body is wearing away, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary, light suffering is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison because we are not looking at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen. For what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. - 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

About the Artwork

When I started out, this was going to be a drawing of a tiki holding a birthday cake. In my mind, it was something of a cross between the November Tiki of the Month and last year’s birthday goat artwork. But as I started drawing, I thought, “What if instead of holding the birthday cake, the tiki is the birthday cake?” That ended up being fun, as well as being different from those previous drawings.

With that in mind, I came up with the initial sketch:

I drew it in red because I knew I would draw over it with the final lines later on. And you can see that I adjusted the position of the candles just a bit because I did not go back and erase the pieces that I did not move. One of the nice things about digital art is that you can move things around instead of having to completely erase and redraw them. Instead of trying to draw a candle for every year, I just went with one for each decade. Although if you really think about it, I - um, I mean somebody around here - has lived in 6 different decades now. Let’s not bother with math, however. And I threw in a couple of presents just for fun, too.

Next up came the final line drawing:

I left the original sketch visible here so that you could see how it looked when I was drawing over that sketch. Except for the candle placement and the size of the presents, there really was not much change from the original sketch to the final version.

Next up I added color after turning off the sketch layer. But once I was done, it did not look quite right to me. I have come to often like more texture than flat color in my artwork. So I went back and painted over the flat color with an acrylic brush (digital still, of course) to add some texture.

This tiki is a bit of a departure from past tikis in a couple of ways. First, there is no wood grain this time, since this one is supposed to be made of cake instead of wood. And second, this one has a black outline, while the others have been outline-free. It was fun to change things up a little this time around.

After the color was finished, I added a watercolor background of the beach. Because who wouldn’t want to spend a birthday on a nice warm beach? I kept the background rather simple, so as not to distract from the main subject. And then I added a bit of texture over the whole thing to simulate paper, too.

Check out more art at the Art by Burnsland page!