Post #454374 by Cammo on Sat, May 16, 2009 11:14 AM

I’ll post pictures of the finished Mystery Mask later – it has 4 coats of wet-sanded poly covering the dark areas now.

First, here is what I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks – making the Volcanoes-of-the-World Series.

The whole idea is to make a series of mugs based on famous or bizarre volcanoes found in the Pacific. They’ll all have a scene from the island on the front and sides, and the name, longitude and latitude on the back. I’m going for an organic look, with a fluted top sliced at a 45 degree angle. They look REALLY different, and the fluted tops mean you can tuck a straw in there real nice....

The first is from Pagan Island, which is a real island! Pagan was evacuated after its 1981 eruption, so it’s currently unoccupied.

It’s also the name of a cheesy-good 1961 movie starring Nani Maka and about 30 girls hand-picked by Bunny Yeager (Bettie Page’s photographer) so I poly-popped up the décor and glopped on the lava. You’ll notice that it’s just starting to hit the head of Nani Maka being sacrificed…

I wanted to play around with the rough, easy grip organic mug and the high-gloss lava drips at the top and inside. So I just hand-molded it, then carved in to get the details. It ends up looking and feeling exactly like carved red stone.

And I like that the whole thing stands on a clean little Japanese-style bottom rim base.

Name, longitude and latitude, just in case you wanna go there:

Laytah!