Shaman Staff - Part 15

I have completed the animal section of the walking stick.  Since then, I have begun to work on the portion of the stick regarding humans.  For a while, I felt as if I had painted myself into a corner.  Drawing the human form is not my best drawing ability.  Also, I am torn as to which way to go with the forms I wish to create.
There are a number of choices here, and I am trying to figure out which one will work best with what is already wood burned onto the stick.  After hours of drawing, I think I have finally figured it out, but now I am back at square one on starting to draw.

The premise of this piece of art was that the Shaman Staff walking stick would have a creation story on it.  Every culture has a story of how the universe was formed and how humans appeared on the scene.  In Western Civilization, this story has come from the book of Genesis for so long that we almost forget that there are other stories out there.  While doing research for this piece, I looked at traditional tribal art and prehistoric art.  One piece of art I came across a Maori drawing symbolizing the first man.  In traditional Maori style, the drawing was very stylized and had circles and spirals, but underneath it all, it was very obvious that there was a picture of a human fetus with a curved back, hands without fully developed fingers, and eyes large for its size.  The picture seemed to convey not only the knowledge that at first human beings don't look like what we consider human, but also some concept that we changed from something not quite human into what is now a human.   It was really this piece that gave me some direction for the next part of the walking stick.  Before there was the first adult man or woman, there was the first infant.

The poem burned into the walking stick has a line: "And now we are manifest in you".  The efforts, hopes, and dreams of all the ancestors have culminated in the current bearer of the walking stick.  I decided to use the shape of an infant to symbolize this person as the youngest, newest member of a long line of humans.  The line gives the person a charge to carry forward with their efforts, creating a bridge between numinous knowledge and the world of form.  Below the infant, there will be stacked silhouettes of humans to symbolize the ancestors.   And that is where I became jammed up, trying to figure out how to portray the ancestors. 

Many primitive drawings portray human bodies by using rectangular, rhomboid, or triangular shapes.  They looked a little too primitive given the writing and shapes already burned onto the Shaman Staff. I next went to attempting to draw human figures based on what I have seen on Polynesian carvings.  Unfortunately, the spirals and circles that look great on a carving six feet tall doesn't translate well to a figure only a couple of inches high.  (It was similar to what happens when you try to draw every stick you see into a landscape drawing.)  Next, I tried totem figures similar to what you see on Pacific Northwest totem poles.  It wasn't quite the look I wanted because I want to focus more on the human aspects rather than spirit aspects.  I finally decided that what I really needed to fit in with the rest of the walking stick was more silhouette figures.  I am just going to have to work on the drawings until I get them right.

I have drawn the figure of the infant.  You might notice in the picture that I have made a note to reduce the size of the drawing.  I have found that sometimes the drawing is good, but it is too large or too small for the space or in relation to some other figure.  It is easier to reduce it on a copier than to attempt to redraw it.  I can make multiple sizes and then choose which one looks best in the available space.  You will also see portions of the figures that are already burned onto the stick.