Post #200597 by sporkboyofjustice on Tue, Nov 29, 2005 12:18 PM

I’ve always liked the three faced bucket mugs so I decided to make a design around that style. These mugs are solid with a wide base making them a little less prone to being knocked over (which can be handy after a night at the tiki bar). These mugs are also comfortable to hold with the faces giving a nice feel to the mug when being gripped. Additionally they are family friendly as they can handle cookies much larger than an Oreo when filled with milk.

With as much as I like the bucket mug there has always been one thing that bothered me about it; the faces on them don’t mean anything to me. Aside from the name printed on some of them they are mostly the same (aside from the few variants). My design attempts to solve this problem while building on the classic foundation of the bucket mug.

I had many choices for themes of my three faces, some of the ideas that I came up with were the modern masters (with likenesses to designs by Stuckie, Bosko and Shag) and Holy Grails (with Tiki Bob, Suffering Bastard and Steve Crane’s Warrior). While these ideas sounded good they lacked significant personal meaning and lacked originality.

I then started to think of my personal tiki journey and how I had gone from not knowing a thing about tikis to the making my own tiki magnets, being known at work as the guy with a cubical full of tikis, and entering a tiki mug design contest. Of course everyone here at Tiki Central has helped me on my way by sharing inspiring projects and much information that I would have otherwise not had so a mention of Tiki Central had to find its way onto the mug.

When I thought more about this I realized that there were three stages to my journey that may also have been shared by others on their journeys: innocence, intrigue and obsession. The innocence stage was the shortest for me, my mother was having her 50th birthday with a Hawaii/Tiki theme, she asked me if I saw anything like that at thrift stores if I would pick it up. Not quite sure what to look for I started the hunt, after about a month I found two tiki mugs they were new but (then I didn’t know that they were) I paid $1 each.

After I had got my first taste I became intrigued by the designs and decided to learn more thus entering the second stage; intrigue. I went to a book store and found The Book of Tiki and read it straight through. I had no idea that tiki had such breadth. From here I continued to read and learn and hunt for tiki treasures.

Somewhere at this time between intrigue and obsession I found Tiki Central. In no time I was carving small tikis out of clay and casting them into magnets as party favors for my mom’s birthday and learning about different kinds of rum. After my mom’s party (I had given her most of my mugs for the party but kept a few) I felt that this was more than something that I had just done for my mom, it was something that I really enjoyed. I started ordering mugs online and hitting the thrift stores with renewed energy.

I had entered the next stage of tiki collecting, obsession. While it hasn’t quite taken over my house (yet) it does have a firm hold in my kitchen and my cubicle at work.

Not being an artist I had some trouble conveying the three stages on paper, What I ended up doing was to take various pictures of myself in the mirror and base the faces loosely on those. Improvements on the faces to better convey what I was trying to do may be in order. I apologize for the poor images but I am without a scanner, should have done them all in ink though. I placed the words Tiki Central on the mug between intrigue and obsession as that’s where TC and all of the wonderful people here came into my journey.

I hope that you enjoy the idea of the mug and that you enjoyed the story of my tiki journey as much as I enjoyed telling it through the design of this mug.