Concrete Tiki

I am a little hesitant to post my Tiki's because frankly I am intimidated by the sheer artistry found here on TC.

My wife (Ratgirl) and I have been trying to make our front yard a little Tiki garden. Inspired by frequent visits to the garden outside the Tiki Room at Disneyland.

We fenced in our yard and made four tiki's that would light up along the wall:

Water

Air

Fire

Earth

They are very easy to craft. Using 5 gallon buckets for each half top/bottom. They are made hollow using 6" PVC and features are made by balling newspaper.

Vaseline is used as a release agent.

Then we take the halves and mortar them together on the wall, I put some pvc pipe in the wall to make a conduit for the wiring.

then my wife goes to work ... she mosaic's the features on over the bare form. Sometimes you might need a chisel to get the eyes and mouth just right.

Then they are coated with mortar colored with charcoal concrete dye.

Raaar! Gulp!

[ Edited by: King Leo 2007-07-23 14:45 ]

We love concrete ... its is so versatile (and permanent) ... it makes great lava.

You can fix an ugly flower bed:

Before

After

We love to entertain. My good buddy does too but sometimes our lawn furniture suffers from what he call "The powerful American ass" ... So when I had some chunks of concrete left over we made a bench:

If you paint the rough concrete with colorable floor and porch paint, it gets smoothish and comfortable for seating.

I like concrete. You should consider doing a tiki using the same care as the volcano you did. Do a search of Seamus and then look around and check out good examples of tiki and such. You would pretty much be the first if you did that if you added your tile work to it(and use more, it looks great).

later teaK