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.

Mia Van Beek Turns Your Kid's Art Into Actual Jewelry, Keychains & Bookmarks.

Jewelry designer Mia Van Beek of Formia Design has come up with a way to turn your children's art into fabulous everlasting mementos in the form of pendants, charm bracelets, earrings, brooches, keychains and bookmarks.



Working with all types of metals [sterling silver, gold, stainless steel, etc], she expertly transforms two dimensional drawings into metal versions of the same.



She can create them as either positive or negative [outlines] pieces and is able to reproduce anything from stick figures to even the most enigmatic representation of a child's imagination.




Words do not suffice, take a look at these examples.

Pendants:







Keychains:





Earrings:

Bookmarks:

Charm Bracelets:


To learn how to submit the art and order your own wonderful piece of her work, go here.

About Mia:

Education and experience:

1988-1991 Jewlery school in Sweden

1992 Journeyman diploma
1996 Goldsmith Master Degree
1997 Degree in design at Collage of arts in Linkoping, Sweden.

2001 set up my own business Formia Design in Stockholm, Sweden
2004 Received Best New Designer of the year award at Stockholm Jewlery show

2004 Established Formia Design LLC in Virginia, USA

She not only creates these whimsical pieces, but it an expert goldsmith and creates other fine jewelry. Visit her website to see her many other jewelry designs.

follow her on Twitter.

Shop her online store.

Shoot, That's Fun. The Bullet Hole Art Of Walt Creel.

above image courtesy of The Birmingham News

Walt Creel of Birmingham, Alabama uses a deadly weapon, ironically, to create images of sweet Southern wildlife. Brandishing a rifle, he fires .22 caliber bullets through 4' x 6' white painted aluminum panels to form images of a deer, an owl, a rabbit, a possum, a squirrel and bird in his project, De-Weaponizing The Gun.


detail of Rabbit:


The pointillist-like art is as interesting to admire up close as it is from afar, and is the artist's attempt at taking away the destructive power of the gun.

Squirrel:

The finished image of Squirrel [above] and creating the piece [below].

Deer:

Close -up of deer:

Bird:

Possum:

Rabbit:

Owl:


DEWEAPONIZING THE GUN by Walton Creel

In the artist's own words:
The terms gun and weapon are practically interchangeable. From hunting to war, self defense to target practice, the gun has been a symbol of power and destruction. Art and entertainment have both taken the same approach to he gun. Traveling Wild West shows had gunslingers that shot crude silhouettes and names, but this was done to illustrate the shooters prowess. Some artists have used high speed film to capture a bullet slicing through its target, while other artists have melted guns into sculptures.



When I decided I wanted to make art using a gun, I was not sure what direction I would have to take. I knew I did not want to use it simply as an accent to work I was doing, but as the focus. My main goal was to take the destructive power away from the gun. To manipulate the gun into a tool of creation and use it in a way that removed it from its original purpose, to deweaponize it.



During my first experiment I came across the concept of creating an image hole by hole on a surface. I also figured out that canvas would be too stressed by the process of a rifle firing many bullets into it.

A test firing of the bullets into canvas:


I moved on to aluminum and, with further experimentation, I figured out exactly how far apart my shots needed to be and that moving beyond .22 caliber was simply too destructive. When the aluminum was painted beforehand, the blast of the gun knocked off a tiny amount of paint around each hole, which helped fuse the image together.

images courtesy of the artist and the Coleman Center For The Arts,

Deweaponizing the Gun is an ongoing series presented in installments.