Post #561803 by bigbrotiki on Tue, Oct 26, 2010 11:07 PM

Thanks for being tolerant, kids, it's just my personal opinion, please.

Naturalistic portrait mugs lie for me somewhere between resin Elvis statues....

...and Disney-character "Tikis":

Tiki mugs, just like Tikis, are not meant to be realistic depictions of someone, the whole reason why Tiki art is cool is because it is stylized version of the human form: Modernist, primitive, or cartoony - or all of that.

The Sven portrait mug joke doesn't quite stick, because when in 2001 Squid whipped up the first version of the Sven-Tiki mug, it looked like this:

...and I recoiled in horror! While it certainly was a fine sculpting job, and flattering to see myself as a bust, it just was so ...un-Tiki. So I sat down with Squid and we squeezed out something that was primarily a cool Tiki mug, and then maybe somewhere had a vague resemblance to moi.

I leave the close-to-life figurines to such companies as Design Toscano and other resin "art" manufacturers that supply the vast market of celebrity collectibles.