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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Conchas & Chilaquiles Faux-Mex - FFFriday Guest Post from Katie Webster!

This week's guest post comes from the delightful Katie Webster at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.  I had the good fortune of working with Katie at the Santa Fe Opera!

Take it away, Katie!
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Pan Dulce: 
We had some delicious Mexican food to create for a production of American Mariachi at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. For this box of pan dulce, including the charming Conchas, everything started with upholstery foam scraps. There are soooooooo many styles (have you seen the Elote ones---bread shaped like corn?) but the conchas are colorful and instantly recognizable. 

I sculpted the upholstery foam into a dome shaped bun. Then I scored the 'shell' pattern into it, maybe 1/4" deep. I sliced away selectively to mimic the cookie crumble topping that is on the conchas. 

A few years ago I learned to keep my blade oiled up when carving any type of foam! 

The Cuernas were shaped by cutting a triangle of 1/4" thin upholstery foam sheet, sprayed with Foam and Fabric adhesive, and then rolling up like you would a real crescent roll.

Then I did a tissue paper layer ( I used Rosco Crystal Gel as the medium but white glue would do the trick).

Next it came down to painting: they definitely got dusted with Design Master's Glossy Wood Tone. For the colorful 'toppings' I used some tube acrylic colors as they had a nice thickness. The finishing touch was a sprinkle of translucent glitter while wet to really capture the sugar coated look. Cinnamon sugar was finely ground cork mixed with glitter, and the powdered sugar was a bit of styrofoam shaved off with a rasp.

Chilaquiles: 

The chilaquiles feature one of my favorite faux food materials, the foam that comes in various thicknesses for packing material! I don't even have a precise term for this, do you know? I've heard so many names for this stuff!  Foam packing sheets, slip sheet, micro foam and roll foam.  It is SO HANDY for fake food! -Aimee

A menagerie of foams!

For the radishes, I cut circles of the foam and painted the edges red while I held them in a stack between thumb and forefinger. 

For the fried tortillas, I cut triangles of the same foam and then gently warmed them with a heat gun. (I tossed them all in a small cardboard box to do this, as they will blow around a lot!) The heat gun melts them just enough to curl and round over the edges to look more like fried chips.

The most time consuming part was the dry time of painting the chips, I tinted Rosco Crystal Gel a light yellow base color and painted each chip. I let dry supported on toothpicks, and then I glazed them all with a wash of reddish brown. 

The garnishes were really fun as well, avocados carved from insulation foam and painted with tinted Crystal Gel. Wood shavings spray painted green for green onions. Crumbled styrofoam for cheese. Small bits of upholstery foam spray painted red and green for tomato and jalapeño. I used some real Chile flakes as well to help my paint look more like sauce! Also, the real cast iron skillet helps complete the illusion. 

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Thanks Katie!  These look awesome and I would 100% like to eat it all.  

Katie is a part of INCITE Colorado and you can learn about them here!

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