Post #583307 by danlovestikis on Mon, Apr 4, 2011 9:00 AM

Hi Michael, congratulations on your 5th anniversary. We are thrilled to be a part of the celebration. We will be there on 4/21/11, Thursday.

I have made 60 mugs and 50 statues in these colors for your party. Each has the Forbidden Island anniversary date carved into the bottom. That way it will be easy to know when your party is due each year.

These are large heavy works of art. Each one has been fine tuned with hand carving and completely hand painted with care. Here are some of the steps.

Here we are putting all the boxed art into the larger boxes to bring to Forbidden Island.

It was a great day when I set the last finished mug/statue on the table.

Then it was time to tape 110 boxes together.

We took one to the grocery store so you could see the large size of these.

Many cold days carving detail and cleaning them up.

I did a ton of glaze tests until I found our favorites.

I did all the glazing inside my home to prevent glaze skips from clay dust.

Rubbing glaze into the writing on the bottoms of the mugs.

Pouring glaze into the mugs.

Drying after coming out of the molds.

Pouring slip into the molds.

Molds drying out.

The finished sculpture in clay. Every line in the head had to be carved into the clay after pouring. The molds didn't capture the fine detail.

The molds arrived from Hawaii. After paying Gecko $$$ to make 6 molds we took lessons and now make our own.

Working on projects in my messy art room.

We are so lucky to have Forbidden Island. We wanted to be a part of it's history and that's why we worked so hard make this art. We are so excited.
Thank you Michael Thanos we love your tiki bar.

See you there, Wendy and Dan Cevola