A Few Fritos for #FakeFoodFriday

It's FFFriday again, and I've got an easy one for you this week!

Materials: Wonderflex, acrylic paint
Tools: Scissors, heat gun, dowel, brushes

This little cup of Fritos were made for an Apprentice Scene in 2018 by our apprentices Alyssa Tryon and Adia Matousek!  Scenes are a single performance (plus run thru and dress rehearsal, obviously), so you may be asking, "But why didn't you just buy Fritos?"  No one was going to eat them, they were just bar dressing, and we didn't want to waste them.  Also it was a great project for Alyssa, who wanted to more fake food (don't we all?!).  In actuality, these were split over 3 small bowls and they had false bottoms put in them so they looked full.  

Each Frito was cut from a piece of Wonderflex  and shaped using a heat gun to soften the thermoplastic, and wrapped gently around a dowel to get the curl.  Alyssa then painted each one with acrylic paint, adding some brown texture for authenticity.  We didn't worry about the grid texture on the back of the Wonderflex, as it's not noticeable unless you're reaaaaally close.  

And that's that!  Happy Friday y'all and Prop On!

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Petit Fours - #FFFriday Guest Post from Helena Mestenhauser!

For this week's #FakeFoodFriday, we have another guest post from Helena Mestenhauser, with a super cute set of petit fours!

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Materials: Insulation Foam, Rosco FlexCoat, Extra Heavy Gel Medium w/ stained glass paint

Tools: Bandsaw, sandpaper, brushes, piping tips and bags

These petit fours are very cute but definitely aren't quick: in order to get the very smooth frosting finish I did multiple very wet coats of Roscoe flex coat and let them naturally dry which was at least 24 hours between coats so be prepared for that!

For any piece of sheet cake style pastry I usually start with cubes of foam cut out on the bandsaw. 

Petit fours have a rounded top shape so I hand sanded the top and side edges to help that shape seem a little softer.

Then it was time for coats of Rosco flex coat. Each layer consisted of a painted on full layer of flex coat smoothed over immediately with a coat of watered down flex coat at about a 1:1 ratio. This allowed the flex coat to really stick and create a dimensional layer but the water still allowed it to smooth over nicely over time as they dried slowly. The first coat was just straight up flex coat- no paint to tint.

The second and final coats (for a total of 3 coats) were both colored- the pure flex coat was tinted with both a little bit of cal-tint and with some white paint. The white paint is important, don't forget it! Flex coat dries clear so if you want the petit fours to be pastel in color you have to add white! 

I didn't bother to tint the 1:1 watered down flex coat for this step: it barely holds color anyway so its not worth trying to tint it as well. 

When your petit fours are fully dry, its time to pipe on some lovely flowers! Kate Stack (instagram handle @k8stack) piped these and they really make the petit fours shine. We used extra heavy gel medium with stained glass paint for our piping to give it a little translucency, but really any spackle with paint through a cake tip will do. As with other fake frostings its super easy to use regular cake piping tips and bags and just swap real frosting for fake, and you can do all the same techniques! Our flower technique requires two different tips: a rather flat one for the leaf, and a medium sized ruffle tip for the flower itself. 

Make sure you really let your frosting dry! Move them too soon and you risk accidentally smooshing them. Bon Apetit!

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Thanks, Helena!  These look completely delightful.  I love a tiny treat, especially ones that look so delicate.  

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Light Apps: Fruit! - #FFFriday

Long time followers of the #FakeFoodFriday hashtag will recognize this week's fruit from when I posted them on instagram over a year ago!  For The Doppleganger at Steppenwolf, we had a three tiered tray of fruits to go with a spread of light apps. These pineapple chunks, orange slices and banana slices were used to fill have the trays to cut down on the amount of real food we put on stage.   I was lucky enough to work on this project with the lovely Emily Feder and Brontë DeShong and we spent A LOT of time making sticky jokes about epoxy.

Materials: Pink insulation foam, bead foam, tissue paper, flex glue, acrylic paint, epoxy
Tools: Olfa knife, paint brushes, acid brushes

Pineapple: 
For the pineapple chunks, I started out with strips of pink foam and cut them into generic pineapple chunk shapes.  I then covered them with yellow tissue paper and flex glue.

Once they were dry, I brushed a bit of light yellow paint on them for a bit of depth.  Once they were fully dry, they were completely covered in epoxy, because they were used by real food and we wanted them to be washable.  To do this, we used acid brushes and 5 minute epoxy on most sides, let it cure, and then repeated the process on the other sides.  Finally, we gave each chunk a light sand to get rid of any hard edges and knock down the shine a bit. 

Oranges:
The oranges are bead foam, artfully carved into wedge shapes.  We opted for bead foam so they would have a bit of texture instead of smooth sides.  They were then coated in white tissue paper and flex glue, allowing it to wrinkle in places, to form the 'juice sacs.'  (I just googled this and I don't really know how I feel about the name.  'Juice vesicles' also was suggested, but really, that's not much better).  

Once the tissue paper was dry, they got a coat of orange tinted flex glue, that was watered down just a touch.  As a result, the flex glue pooled into the lower areas, leaving white ridges, giving the oranges a great texture!  Shout out to Emily Feder for figuring these out!

They also got a light drybrush of white for highlights.  Then, like the pineapples, we coated them with epoxy and finished with a light sand.  

Mmm... juicy

Banana slices: 

For our bananas, we cut a bunch of circles out of 2" pink insulation foam using an olfa knife, and then sliced it like you would a banana.  They were sanded slightly for shape, then coated with white tissue paper and flex glue.  This was a two step process to get both faces and the sides.  

They then got painted with light yellow acrylic paint and allowed to dry.  Then their center detail paint was added.  We finished them up with a coat of epoxy (the most difficult of the three, in my opinion. Getting the sides was... difficult), and finished with sanding like the other two. 

Did I dig through the whole pile to find one that had a little face?  I sure did.

I almost finished this up with, "and that was that," but this project was quite time consuming due to the epoxy coating.  It's possible we could have coated them with a different sealer, shellac perhaps,  but we were worried that an 8 show/week schedule would be too harsh on them.  Our fruits were washed after every performance.  And of course I didn't get a picture of them all together on their tray, because tech.  There is some real pineapple in our fridge calling my name, and I think it's snack time.  Prop on!

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Lettuce! - A Quick #FFFriday from Katie Webster!

This week's Fake Food Friday is quick one, mostly because I just started my summer job in Santa Fe and the lack of air here has made me le tired.  Anna made some lettuce for The Dagwood of Your Dreams, which was awesome and cartoony.  Katie Webster at the Denver Center has a slightly different technique for a different look!

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Another fun faux food project with the thin packing foam sheet! My fellow prop artisan Roo Huigen had made adorable seedling sprouts with the translucent packing foam. I thought I could translate her idea into lettuce form when we had to make crates of abundant food for Oklahoma! In this case, I cut loose leaf shapes from a shiny, sheer, synthetic fabric that we had in our fabric stock. 

That was key to the success of this project and saved a lot of time. If you were trying to recreate this exact process, it will depend on the fabric you have access to, and you will have to experiment to achieve the look you want. Look for sheer, somewhat stiff synthetic fabric. Luckily we had green, but a pale yellow or white could work.

 Then I used hot glue to create leaf veins on the fabric leaf. While it was cooling I sandwiched on a layer of the thin packing foam. 

I trimmed the edges of all the leaves, then in a well ventilated area I used a heat gun to melt the fabric and foam. The foam and fabric melt at different times, creating organic ripples and soft curled edges and emphasizing the hot glue 'veins'.

I toned the leaves with various Design Master sprays to maintain the translucent look of the leaves. 

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Thanks, Katie!  I'd love to see how this technique looks with different fabric colors, it could make for some very interesting greens.  

Katie is a part of INCITE Colorado and you can learn about them here!  She also contributed a post about some excellent looking conchas and chilaquiles.  

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Leftover Pizza - #FakeFoodFriday

Friday is pizza day, the best day of the week!
This leftover pizza was made for Max Bialystock's office in The Producers.  I got to work with my new favorite material, gel wax!  I hope y'all are ready for a lot of pictures, because I went overboard on this project...

Materials: Cake boards, shelf liner, Foamies sheet foam, Jaxsan, thin thermoplastic, Gel Wax, sawdust, Glossy Wood Tone, acrylic paint, machine or mineral oil
Tools: Olfa knife, hot plate & pan, spoon, heat gun, cheese grater (if you have a non-food one)

I started with some wedges of shelf liner laminated to some sheet foam (foamies, fun foam, etc depending on where you buy them), and then coated with Jaxsan, building up a slight crust edge on one side.  

I then painted with acrylic and dusted with glossy wood tone.  I also made pepperonis out of some thin thermoplastic that I found in stock.  

For my sauce, I melted some gel wax and added wax dye for color. I did a lot of sampling on white to see what it would look like when it was dry. I ended up adding some regular white candle wax to firm it up and add some opaqueness. I also ended up adding some sawdust in hopes to add some tomato-y texture. In the end I should have used more, as it didn't build up as much as I hoped that it would.

I spooned my gel wax onto my pizza slices and let it set.  As you can see, my sawdust didn't add as much body as I thought it would once it was on the slices.  

CHEESE!

For the cheese I tinted more gel wax and put it in a mini pie tin to cool.  (I've actually been keeping several of the pie tins around because they're great to use with the gel wax.  They're non-stick so everything peels or pops out and it's super handy.) I used a mix of yellow and brown tints and added quite a bit of white regular wax (really they were old emergency candles because that's what I had). There was also a wedge of yellow wax that was in our materials stock that I grabbed in case I wanted to add a little variety into the cheese.  

I couldn't find a grater in stock, so I shaved my cheese with an Olfa knife and added in the pepperoni slices.  

It's super hard to hold a heat gun and take a picture at the same time

Cooking the pizza!  Which basically entailed me passing a heat gun over the slices until my wax melted again.  i tried not to fully melt all the cheese to keep some of the texture, so I did it in stages.

Previously I had artfully added some machine oil (mineral oil or sewing machine oil also works) to my cake boards to make them look greasy.  I don't recommend using any kind of real veg oil because it can smell.  
I just slapped my slices down, sprinkled some leftover sauce and cheese wax and hit it with a heat gun again.  I tried smearing some of the sauce around as well.  I ended up using the wax to hold the slices on, which was moderately successful.  Hot glue probably would have been more effective, but I didn't have a hot gun handy and was in a hurry (of course).  

I let them cool and off they went to rehearsal.  They ended up stuck in funny places as 'gross' set dressing.  

Though thin crust isn't my favorite, I'd still eat it, because any pizza is better than no pizza... unless it's made of foam and wax, I guess... 

At the time this post goes live I'll be on my way to my summer job in Santa Fe, where I will definitely be eating pizza with green chile at some point.  If all goes according to plan, Fake Food Fridays will continue throughout the summer!  As always, I'm still accepting guest tutorials!

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Slammin' Ham! - FFFriday Guest Post from Victoria Ross

After a brief and accidental hiatus, guest Fake Food Friday's are back, and it's back with a bang or rather, a slam!  This excellent ham is courtesy of Victoria Ross at Triad Stage and was mentioned on Silk Flowers and Papier Mache Hearts in Episode 37 - Skin of A Dragon. This post is also a return to casting and molding, which we haven't had in ages.  

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Raw, Bloody Ham - Two Trains Running at Triad Stage 2019

What a glamour shot... or should I say hamour shot?

Materials: Smooth-On DragonSkin, Vaseline, mineral spirits, Smooth-On Silc Pig, Smooth-On Psycho Paint, leftover silicone (for filler)

Tools: ham mold, mixing containers, stir sticks, Personal Protective Equipment

Safety Note: Though DragonSkin is Certified Skin Safe, always read the Technical Bulletin for any casting and molding materials before you use them, and follow common sense safety procedures.

Step One: Procuring a Ham Mold

The mold was created for a previous production molded off of a real ham, and it was originally intended for expanding foam. Since I would be casting in silicone, I needed mold release. I made my own release from vaseline and mineral spirits, which worked like a charm! To limit the volume of Smooth-On Dragon Skin needed, I filled the core of the ham with a silicone 'pit' -- a pink chunk left over from past materials (we save everything for this exact reason). I secured the two-part mold with ratchet straps, cradled it in upholstery foam scraps within a box, mixed my parts and began to pour.

Step Two: Washing a Ham

Our ham was cast from Dragon Skin tinted with Smooth-On Silc Pig pigments. I made the rubber a fleshy hue with subtle white and red streaks to provide a 'base coat' of color.

I washed the mold release off the ham to prepare it for painting.

Step Three: Painting a Ham

Painting with tinted rubber is a blast! I used Smooth-On (are they a sponsor yet?) two-part Psycho Paint with the Silc Pig pigments to create my pallet of pinky flesh, reddish brown blood, and white fat marble. I based my highlights and shadows from a research image, and I used popsicle sticks and my fingers to paint the rubber paint onto the ham.

Step Four: Slamming a Ham

Once the ham was dry and all silicone paint had bonded to itself, I gave the ham a thorough bath and handed it off to stage management. The ham interacts with stage blood on the actors hands, so having it be washable was a must. It also is slammed on the counter, and the weight and slap of rubber makes the effect truly deliver. The lighting designer even gave the ham its own spot light - a most appropriate lighting for a ham, after all.

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What a gorgeous ham and epic lighting!  Thank you Victoria for sharing.  You can check out more of Victoria's projects at http://www.propertyofprops.com/.

And no ham post is complete without one of my favorite gifs of all time: 

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CAKE!

Materials:  Insulation foam, Acrylic Caulk, Design Master Spray, Acrylic Paint, Hot Glue, Fake Flowers

Here is another  Fake-n-Cake for your enjoyment! This one is for the graduation party scene in Renaissance Theaterwork's upcoming production of ' Crumbs From the Table of Joy '  The show is a memory play, and so certain props are embellished to show their importance in the main character's  memory.  One of these props is her graduation cake, made by the bakery where her father works.

This is another of my standard foam and caulk cakes.  I used Ivory colored Design Master to get the color, and used hot glue to attach fake flowers.  The one misstep was adhering the two tiers together before icing. I should have iced them separately, allowed them to dry, attached them, and then applied the decorative icing.  Ah well, hindsight is 20/20.

If you'd like to learn more about decorating fake cakes, you can watch the videos from my first cake posts here:
Cake Tutorials

and here:
One More Cake Tutorial

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Hammy Sammies aka Hammy New Year!

Materials: Upholstery Foam, Liquid Latex, Microfoam, Fake Tomatoes, Jaxsan

 Hey, all. Sorry that it's been a bit since my last post. I've had a perfect storm of three big shows at work, one freelance show on the side, and the holidays! Boy Howdy! Well, I'm two weeks away from opening one big show and one side show, and the holidays are....well, tomorrow they'll be over. So, here I am, bringing you another fun and exciting post about food fakery.

These Dagwood sandwiches were fun to make because they are meant to look a little over sized and proppy. They are for our upcoming production of 'The 39 Steps,' a humorous take on the Hitchcock film of the same name.  We're not going for realism here, we're going for humorously over sized,  fake sandwiches that are obviously made of ham and tomatoes.

The bread is foam and latex.  I cut out a vague bread shape from upholstery foam and coated the 'loaf' with several coats of liquid latex. After a quick spritz of Design Master for that oven browned look, I sliced up the loaf with my trusty Olfa knife.

Next up were the tomatoes.  Commercially produced fake fruit and veggies can sometimes be a good starting point for built food. In this case, I had fake tomatoes with foam cores.  I sliced the tomatoes (as you would a real tomato) which gave me the correct size and shape of a tomato slice, as well as a finished edge. Then, I coated the foam with flex glue, and painted the surface with acrylics to look like a tomato slice.

The ham is made from microfoam packing material coated with Jaxsan and painted with Design Master and acrylics. I spray painted the pieces with Dusty Rose, and then painted the edges with Burnt Sienna for that ham skin look.

Hehe. Ham stack.

Once all of the components were created, it was time to assemble!  I wanted these sandwiches to be as sturdy as possible, so I stitched them together in layers with nylon thread, after using green glue to hold the folded ham slices together.  Since I didn't want the stitches to show on the top and bottom slices of bread, I used rubber cement to glue the last pieces of bread on.

Now, if these sandwiches were supposed to be more realistic, I would have done a few things differently. First, I would have worked to make the bread look more convincing by trying different types of foam and adjusting the color. My approach to the ham would have been similar, though I would have taken more time with the paint job to make it look more realistic. Perhaps I would have pepper crusted the edges.  The tomatoes? Well......thinner slices and fewer of them.  Also, I would have added some more details. These sandwiches are rather cartooney. Some purchased fake lettuce goes a long way towards adding texture and interest to a fake sandwich.  Also, I would have dressed them on a plate with chips or potato salad,  something to help with context and realism.

As it is, the sandwiches are pretty funny. I had a good time walking around the shop with them before they were assembled and letting them explode and bounce all over the floor.  All in all, not a bad way to start the year in the Fake-n-Bake kitchen.  Coming up soon (most likely) a floofy graduation cake, Garibaldi biscuits, and the epic tale of life casting, failed materials, and a fast approaching deadline.

NOM NOM NOM

So, from me and the sandwiches, Hammy New Year. May your 2011 be filled with excellent food, both real and fake! Happy propping!

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