Kiko Yamada gives Maui visitors bigger grins, bolder brows and a portrait to carry home.
Story by Ariella Nardizzi
Photographs by Ninja Sketch
KIKO YAMADA STARTS reading a face as soon as someone steps into her Kīhei studio. From the first “hello,” she clocks the weight of their eyebrows, how their teeth show when they laugh and whether a face runs long or wide. The trick of the trade is knowing which features to push – and when to stop.
“I’m a character designer,” Yamada said. “I take their real features and make people into a cartoon character that’s goofy and wonky.”
At her storefront in Kihei Kalama Village, Yamada turns a few minutes in the chair into a drawing visitors can carry home.
Yamada draws as Ninja Sketch, likening herself to a Japanese “ninja with art tools.” She begins with a loose sketch, strengthens the lines with markers and adds color with wax pastels. A memorable nose, a wide grin or a pair of high eyebrows gives her a place to begin. The rest follows until the likeness looks a little goofier, but still unmistakably theirs.
The artist chats with guests throughout the sitting. She asks what brought them to Maui and listens for details that might find their way into the caricature. A quick story or burst of laughter can change which feature she pushes furthest.
When the drawing is finished, Yamada turns it around for the reveal. In 19 years, she says, no one has left upset. “People come to get roasted,” she said. “There’s always lots of laughs coming from the seat.”
She films the page turn and shares time-lapse videos of each drawing online, where she has an audience of millions. Some visitors plan their Maui itineraries around a session at her South Kīhei shop. One guest even recruited her help with a proposal, captured in caricature.
Yamada grew up in a family of artists in Colorado and began her career painting hyper realistic oil portraits, capturing each detail exactly as she saw it. Caricature loosened those rules. “I was trained to be precise,” she said. “I had to learn to break that.”
She learned the trade at Universal Studios, then spent years living in an RV and drawing at fairs across the country. From each sketch, she learned how far a nose, grin or jaw could stretch and still look like its owner.
She later taught seminars in Kyoto and Tokyo, drew in 30 states and three countries and sketched at the red-carpet premiere of Spider-Man: Homecoming in Hollywood. She has earned 14 awards from the International Society of Caricature Artists.
After the pandemic, Yamada moved to Maui and set up on Front Street in Lāhainā. She lost that stand in the 2023 fire but restarted in South Kīhei.
At Kihei Kalama Village, her drawing chair sits amid prints, keychains, magnets and stickers that she designed. A second cast of characters fills the shop: geckos, bright red ʻiʻiwi, mejiro (Japanese white-eye) and chickens wandering parking lots.
Her “Chicken in Hawaiʻi” series is a favorite, Yamada says. The same birds visitors spot in parking lots strut across her keychains, magnets and stickers. Like her caricatures, it’s a detail that lingers. Slightly quirky, entirely true and uniquely Hawaiian.
