Post #281933 by VanTiki on Tue, Jan 30, 2007 12:53 PM

Aloha All!

Welp, after getting several "where are the 2007 VanTiki mugs?" PM's I decided I better update the Ohana on the goings-on in VanTiki Studio! Rest assured, I have not been idle :) I set January aside to finally get cooking on a project I've been wanting to tackle for over a year: TikiTile! Yessir - genuine hand-pressed high-relief tiles for your bar, kitchen, bathroom, or grass shack! (well - maybe not so much for the shack)

It all started with the construction of the VanTiki Studio Tile Press. It is based on a Tile Press design by tile artist Frank Giorgio. I made some modifications to beef it up a bit. Had a great time putting it together - especially since the materials only cost around $150 - and a store bought tile press in this size starts at over $700!

Next up - sculpting the tiles. I did a TON of doodles for tile designs (most of them were done while I spent many hours waiting in the stand-by ticket line when Prairie Home Companion came to Hawaii), and picked 8 favorites for my first tile set. Of those, I decided to sculpt only a few tiles (the simplest) to get a handle on the process before doing the entire series. Here are the first sculpts - all are based on my Jabber Pod mug. Two 4" Jabber faces, a 2" Jabber face, and a 2" wood grain field tile. All are sculpted in a soft oil-based clay made by Chavant (Chavant Le Beau Touche):

I made plaster molds of the above tiles (I was able to pull three molds off the field tile - whoo!) - and then had to wait a painstaking 10 days for the plaster to dry out enough for me to press clay into the molds. Sunday night I decided to give it a go - and things went very smoothly. The tile press worked like a charm (had to bolt it down to the table - it REALLY has a lot of leverage) - and the first run of tiles looked great. Had a bit of trouble with the high relief on the 4" tiles - but a little creative packing on pressing round 2 seems to have solved the problem. Here are some of the first freshly pressed tiles:

Whew! So now you know what I've been up to this month! Next up I gotta sculpt the rest of the "series 1" tiles and glaze the ones I've pressed. Not to worry - I'm still doing mugs! In fact - I've got a bunch of sketches that I can't wait to turn into clay.

Mahalo for peeking!

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http://www.vantiki.com

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