Finger Lickin' Landscapes. Photos of Edible Environments by Carl Warner.

Photographer Carl Warner creates miniature worlds crafted entirely of food, textiles or other objects and then photographs them. Today I want to share with you his Foodscapes, as he calls them. Meat mountains, broccoli trees, cabbage seas, chocolate rivers and cereal leaves are just some of the fun elements in the dioramas. Made with most things edible, the landscapes and buildings have obvious commercial applications, but some are just as appetizing to gaze upon. He even sells photographic prints of them (links to purchase the prints, a book and the new wall calendar are at the end of this post).

About creating his Foodscapes, Carl says:
The ‘Foodscapes’ are created in Carl’s London studio where they are built on top of a large purpose built triangular table top. The scenes are photographed in layers from foreground to background and sky as the process is very time consuming and so the food quickly wilts under the lights. Each element is then put together in post production to achieve the final image.

“Although I’m very hands on with my work, I do use model makers and food stylists to help me create the sets. I tend to start with a drawing which I sketch out in order to get the composition worked out, this acts as a blue print for the team to work to.”

Once the drawing is agreed upon, Carl then works out what each part of the scene will be made from, and working with his food stylist they together determine the best ingredients to work with in order to achieve his aims.

“I tend to draw a very conventional landscape using classic compositional techniques as I need to fool the viewer into thinking it is a real scene at first glance, it is the realisation that the scene is in fact made of food that brings a smile that brings a smile to the viewer, and for me that’s the best part”

Having worked for many years as a photographer bringing ideas to life for advertising agencies Carl became very experienced in lighting, and especially the recreation of natural looking light using a combination of tungsten and flash lighting equipment.

“I’ve always enjoyed the discipline of working in the studio, and the spontaneity of working outdoors in natural light, as you never know what you’re going to get. With my ‘Foodscapes’ I can now put together the knowledge of natural light with the control of recreating it in the studio in order to bring out the colours and textures as well as the beauty of a scene”

These images can take up to two or three days to build and photograph and then a couple of days retouching and fine tuning the images to blend all the elements together. Carl spends a lot of time planning each image before shooting in order to choose the best ingredients to replicate larger scale shapes and forms within nature, so he spends a lot of time staring at vegetables in supermarkets which makes him seem a little odd! However, he is careful to point out that finding the right shaped broccoli to use as a tree is an all important task.

“Although there is a fair amount of waste, there is a lot of food left over which is always shared out with the team, though most of the food used in the sets have either been super glued or pinned and none of this makes for good eating!”

About Carl:

Born in Liverpool, 1963 Carl has spent most of his life drawing and taking pictures. He has worked mainly in the advertising industry for the past twenty years, based at his London studio, and now lives with his long suffering wife and four children in the Kent countryside.




A book of his Food Landscapes was published last year and shows 'behind the scenes' pictures of Carl at work as well as descriptions in his own words of how they were inspired and created. And a new 2012 Wall Calendar featuring his Foodscapes is also available.



You can buy prints of some of his amazing Foodscapes here.

See all of his various types of photography at his website

Pantone Color Chip Cookies! Kim Neill Bakes Up Deliciously Divine Design.

Freelance designer and illustrator Kim Neill was inspired to turn Pantone color chips into edible cookies after finding the Pantone color tins by Seletti at a nearby art supply store.


above: Kim Neill with her fabulous Pantone Chip cookies in the Pantone Tins, above right

As a holiday gift for her clients, she filled the tins with rectangular sugar cookies topped with colored icing and used an edible marker to indicate the PMS colors.




Kim even made METALLIC pantone chips. Using bottles of silver and gold edible luster dust to rush atop the icing, she created cookies in PMS Metallic Silver 877, Gold 871 and Pink 8062.



The cookies in the tins were a huge hit with her clients. The faves? Seems that the PMS 485, PMS 183 and Silver 877 were the most popular.

How to make Kim's brilliant PANTONE CHIP COOKIES:

FOR THE DOUGH:
She used Mary’s Sugar Cookie recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook. Super tasty. Recipe here.

Roll dough out between 1/4” and 1/8“ thickness. Thinner cookies keep their shape better. Cut 2” x 2.5” rectangles out of dough (using a stencil from cardboard may make it easier). Cook until lightly golden brown, keeping an eye on them as they cook because they cook quickly.

Note: If you are filling a Pantone Tin, three batches of cookies will only fill up the tin halfway. They are big tins, so to resolve this, Kim ended up lining the bottom of the tin with folded over bubble wrap to make the tin appear full.

An alternative to the tin would be to fill with Pantone mugs with the cookies, which make for a nice individual gift. Purchase the Pantone Storage Tins or the Pantone Mugs for your cookies.

FOR THE ROYAL ICING:
This is a great recipe to use because it keeps color vibrant, doesn’t fade and dries nice without being too hard. Flavor with white vanilla here if you can. Regular vanilla tends to darken the icing a bit. You might want to add a bit more milk then the recipe calls for to get the perfect spreading consistency. Recipe found here.

DECORATING THE COOKIES:
Make a big bowl of white royal icing. Start by spreading a strip of white icing across the all the cookie bottoms and let dry. Now use what’s left of your white icing to make colors.

Scoop 3-4 heaping tablespoons of icing in a tiny bowl and then color with solid food coloring. This will color 3-5 cookies. Once you are done with one color, rinse your bowl out and start again. Doing colors this way keeps the mess down and you don’t have to worry about what you just mixed drying out. Using a food dye pen, write the matching [or closest] PMS number down on the cookies.

Kim used Gourmet Food Writers, available for purchase here. To make the Metallic Chips, use a soft brush or cotton ball to burnish icing surface with gold or silver luster dust, available for purchase here.

all images and recipes courtesy of Kim Neill.

Soup For Sluts & Other Rad Ramen Noodles

The folks over at Blue Q have taken the college student's staple, instant Ramen Noodle Soup, and cleverly repackaged four different flavors with hilarious names. The genuine and yes, authentically edible, instant Asian noodle soups come in the following flavors; Soup For Sluts [spicy vegetable], Wasted & Broke [spicy beef], Hello Lazy [chicken flavored] and Din Din Fuk Chow [shrimp] and cost $2.99 each for each 3oz 85g package. Admittedly a bit more that the .39 cent versions you can find at your local market, but the reaction when someone sees them is worth the $2.60 difference.






Buy them here

Bottles Of Bud. Canna Cola Launches Five Flavored Pot-Laced Sodas.

If you've been following the news, there's been quite a bit of 'buzz', pardon the pun, about Canna Cola, a new line of THC-infused carbonated beverages for intended sale at medicinal marijuana dispensaries.



The five flavored medical marijuana soda pops; Canna Cola, Orange Kush, Sour Diesel, Grape Ape and Doc Weed are the brain child of multi-talented designer, concert photographer, political cartoonist and entrepreneur Clay Butler.




Scott Ridell of Diavolo Brands, who created the products along with Clay [they are not marketing it... that was an error in the Santa Cruz Sentinel article], says the beverage line's dosage of THC will be "somewhere between 35 to 65 milligrams" and that that "the levels of THC in his line of soft drinks will be substantially below the levels of many drinks now on the market." He likened his product to a "light beer" alongside high-proof liquors.



Although there are several THC laced sodas on the market, most are produced in small batches and lack the marketing effort of a larger brand. Kushtown Sodas and Dixie Elixirs are two examples.

Clay, a self-proclaimed "clean living guy" says he's never even smoked a cigarette, let alone marijuana.


above: Clay and some of his Soda Pot (photo for Santa Cruz Sentinel by Bill Lovejoy)

An article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel quotes Clay as saying "Marijuana sodas do exist in the marketplace. But, said Butler, none of them have the branding savvy of his product.

"You look at all the marijuana products out there, and they are so mom-and-pop, hippie-dippy, and rinky dink," he said. "If someone can put every color on the rainbow on it, they do. If they can pick the most inappropriate and unreadable fonts, they will. And there's marijuana leaves on everything. It's a horrible cliché in the industry."

Kushtown's THC-infused sodas and sauces:


Dixie Elixir changed their original marijuana leaf logos:

to a more subtle, but difficult to read, design:

Butler's epiphany was to market the THC-laced sodas "how Snapple or Coca-Cola or Minute Maid would make a marijuana beverage, if they ever chose to do it."

Thus, he used the marijuana leaf - it's an unavoidable part of the "brand DNA" of marijuana products, he said - but he designed a leaf made of bubbles (shown below), to suggest soda pop.


above: Clay Butler designed the logo and bottle designs for the Soda Pot.

Clay's graphic design skills came in handy. The bottles have fabulously fun imagery and clever names.

The sodas are intended to be priced at between $10 and $15 for each 12 oz bottle and are planned for launch in medical marijuana-friendly Colorado next month. California, however, remains a wild card. THC-infused sodas cannot be transported across state lines according to Federal laws (despite individual state laws regarding medicinal marijuana use), so the product would have to be manufactured in California to be sold there.

Plans are tentatively to have it in California dispensaries in the spring.

Canna Cola on Facebook

Read the Santa Cruz Sentinel article