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!

Read more

FFFriday: Martinis!

Happy Fake Food Friday everyone!  It's time for part 2 of our revisit of Anna's Dirty Martinis!  In part 1 I went over my olives, and now it's time for the fun part: The liquor!

Materials: Gel Wax, acrylic martini glasses, olives on skewers

Tools: Hot Plate, small pan, spoon

Anna used acrylic water for her martinis, but for ours I used one of my new favorite materials, gel wax!  I'll be doing a Materials Monday on it because it is so nifty and has so many uses.  In this project I used ArtMinds Gel Wax from Michaels.  
A quick run down of Gel Wax: it comes in a tub, and you can get it at pretty much any craft store in the candle making section.  You can color it with wax dyes and you can heat it on a stove top.  It's solid once it cools, so it's much quicker than the acrylic water.  

Hot plate set up

Because I didn't need to dye the martinis any color, I didn't bother to measure how much gel wax I was using.  I just put a bunch in a pot and let it heat up.  Because I wanted them to be as clear as possible, I made sure I heated the wax until all the bubbles were out and it was very liquidy.  The big risk in this is if you're pouring into an acrylic vessel (as is the case most of the time for theater) is that it might melt.  I didn't melt any glasses this time around, but I've definitely done so in the past (and will gladly share in my gel wax post).  I also read that you want to make sure to use a metal stirrer, not wood, because wood can introduce bubbles into the wax.  My skewers definitely did!

The cool thing about gel wax is you can pour it in layers and not get stratified lines because the wax just melts into itself.  These are my first two half pours.  I noticed that I was getting bubbles, both from the wooden skewers and from the cool air.  

They became more pronounced as the wax cooled.  

Heat the wax, heat the glass!

I tried to warm up my area and the glasses a bit with a space heater, and that did seem to help some.  

In the end, I couldn't get rid of my bubbles.  I did find that pouring the wax, then placing the olive skewer did help to make sure the wax got all the way around the olives, but bubbles still happened.  This wasn't a huge problem for us, as our house size is huge, and the bubbles actually made it look like there was liquid in the glass.  

Two of my best pours

I never did get a shot of all of them together, as we were rushing to get these to rehearsal.  I think they turned out pretty well, despite the bubbles.  If I were to do it again, I'd probably seal the skewers and olives in hopes that they wouldn't cause as many bubbles, but I'd want to do a test to see if a spray sealer would react in any way with the wax.  

Shortly after this project, (and after I had finished this tub of wax), I did a round of champagne with a different brand, Country Lane Gel Wax from Hobby Lobby, which barely bubbled at all!  That was unfortunate for the champagne, but would have been perfect for these martinis!  Ah, well, live and learn.  

I'm not really a martini girl, so I can't say this project made me want one, but my summer boss Randy is a big fan, so I'm going to end this with a quote from him.  

"It's like a salad if you get it extra dirty" 

Cheers!

Read more