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!