Mobile Applications

Color Snap by Sherwin-Williams

Sherwin Williams

According its info page, with this app you can take, save, store and color match photos with the 1,500 Sherwin Williams paint colors. Also with the match comes a coordinating palette and RGB numbers.

Art

Steve Hough at Zg Gallery

Steve Hough; Zg Gallery

Hough’s work is an inquiry into the sense of mystery and awe that occupies the transitional space between specific conditions or states.  He is interested in the flux between binaries such as image and object, form and flatness, the fleeting and the permanent, the personal and the universal.  By creating figurative images solely through the use of surface-distortions and reflective color-shifting auto-paint, he explores the interplay between image, surface and viewer, and references the anonymous reproducibility of contemporary personal experience, its relationship to the boundary membrane of a screen, and the desire to perfect and objectify moments in time - to own them.

Incredibly detailed and colorful bento art from Sakurako Kitsa (there is one from chotda as well). Not only are Sakurako's creations visually beautiful but the ingenuity used to create some of the aspects, like "pureed sweet potato piped through a ziplock bag" for the hair on a portrait bento, is great.

Here's a selection of Sakurako's bento art along with some Q & A from here flickr profile.

Some of your combinations don't look appetizing to me.

Every once in a while, I find something that would be perfect for the "picture" but might raise eyebrows palatewise (do palates have eyebrows?). I've gone ahead and used it, and eaten it, and I've found it's not that bad, not too different from items running together on a dinner plate. Of course, if you're one of those people who can't stand for your food items to touch each other at all, bento in general might not be your thing, unless you're really into cups and dividers. I've seen some wacky combinations in mainstream bento, too.

I think the weirdest combo I ever did were the puffs of cotton candy (aka fairy floss, aka sugar floss) on the turkey and rice in my Ichi the Killer bento. But nothing else would have worked the same way, and when it all comes down to it, it was just a small bit of sugar. I felt validated when Cat Cora (my favorite chef) topped a savory soup with cotton candy on Iron Chef America. The judges were weirded out at first, but then they tasted it, liked it, and declared it "fun". We're pioneers!

Here’s a roundup of the most colorful art, products, websites and such that I’ve come across in the last week.

Art

AJ Fosik

myspace; David Smith Gallery: More Images

Fantastic wooden animal sculptures by AJ Fosik.

While maybe not as colorful as our Rainbow Cake from last week, here is a collection of impressive designer cakes.

the-icing-on-the-cake & megpi

the-icing-on-the-cake

the-icing-on-the-cake

This is guest post from Aleta Meadowlark from the deliciously written food blog Omnomicon. She was nice enough to let us share this post with the community. Make sure to visit the original post: here, for the recipe and all the images of this most colorful rainbow cake.

So I did mention something about health and/or diet food in my last post, and while this recipe is the latter, it is most certainly not to be confused with the former. The cool thing is that if you’re making something so distractingly colourful, people will think it’s delicious no matter what.

This presents me with the option to use an old Weight Watchers trick—the one-point cupcake. Except I’m making a cake and I created my own frosting. Kinda. I’ve seen it done before, but I swear I made it up first!

This cake is suitable for many occasions:

• A child’s birthday
• Your mom’s birthday
• Coming out to your conservative parents
  • If you’re a lesbian, they’ll be thrilled that you won’t be forgoing your feminine kitchen duties.
  • If you’re the kind of gay dude who makes cakes for your parents, they were probably on to you anyway.
• Coming out to your conservative parents on your mother’s birthday
• Your friend’s jam band CD release party

. . . so I’m sure you’ll find a use for this recipe soon.

Today we give thanks for color, and to do that we're taking a look at the colors of the best part of thanksgiving, the food.

In the United States, certain kinds of food are traditionally served at Thanksgiving meals. First and foremost, baked or roasted turkey is usually the featured item on any Thanksgiving feast table (so much so that Thanksgiving is sometimes referred to as "Turkey Day") Stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, sweet corn, other fall vegetables, and pumpkin pie are commonly associated with Thanksgiving dinner. All of these primary dishes are actually native to the Americas or were introduced as a new food source to the Europeans when they arrived.

Turkey

Photo by ckirkman

We're constantly looking to nature for inspiration in so many ways, and it's no wonder that these artist were inspired by the bright, rich colors of fruits and vegetables (plus the taste of crispy sweet biscuits which are food art in their own sense) that make up the basis for their colorful sculptures and photos.

Fruit and Vegetable Carvings by James Parker

When looking at a bright orange of a pumpkin he sees the sun, red peppers: the rays. James Parker is one of the worlds leading fruit and vegetable carvers and with its recent increase in popularity and the visibility of artists like James, food art is reaching new levels in creativity. Check out this slide show and article from the New York Times.

More than just a musical fruit, beans are also a great source of inspiration because of their widely varying colors. Commonly referring to the seeds of plants in the Fabaceae (formely Leguminosae) family, but also the developed pods or plants, beans are part of a family that includes 730 genera and over 19,400 species. Today, we look to those tasty seeds for palette and color inspiration. And, if you're trying to come up with a new recipe for a 20 or so bean soup, click on the images to learn more about many of the beans.

Cannelini beans

While it takes a brave soul to paint one's living room a vibrant shade of persimmon or yellow, the kitchen is often a room in which one feels more courageous when it comes to decorating vibrantly. It is truly the best room for it, especially if one subscribes to the beliefs about the effects of colors as used in the home (although if everyone subscribed to that, we would never see the gorgeous red rooms that leave us breathless on the pages of design magazines!)

As the kitchen is essentially a creative place, use of colorful decor can only intensify the mood and give the room a vibe of powerful positivity. There are several ways to add color to your own kitchen, whether you choose to take the route of permanent change with paint or simply using colorful accessories for accent, it's all up to you!

Via Tsuga Studios

Adding Accessories

Painting your kitchen a strong color is a definite commitment. No matter how long you spend staring at your color swatches and envisioning the new walls, it never quite matches up to the final product. For the decorator uneasy with a complete overhaul, colorful accents in a plain white or neutral kitchen go a long way when it comes to making the room "pop." Best of all, if you tire of the look they can be removed, or if you want to try a different color all you have to do is change your accessories and you have an instant new look. Here are a few fun pieces that can make immediate impact:

Via Pottery Barn

Via Williams-Sonoma

In reading through the COLOURlovers' blog, it’s easy to see that food is a common inspiration for color lovers of all kinds, as well it should be! Color is probably one of the oldest tools for knowing how to navigate the ancient grocery store of the forest.

Yet as many people know, our mono-culture food system is also going monochromatic. With so much variety out there, why are our apples and tomatoes almost all red? And how did our corn get so yellow?

Why Red?

“Apples of New York,” a 2 volume encyclopedic listing of apples grown in New England during the 1800's, lists over 1,000 varieties of apples, yet today we’re lucky if we find 10 in all the grocery stores across America and almost all of them red: Honeycrisp, Cameo, Red Delicious, Braeburn, McIntosh, Jona Gold, Fuji, Gala, Courtland, Empire, and Golden Delicious.

In the early 1900's Washington State Apple Growers launched an expensive promotional campaign to market just one apple: The Red Delicious. Their campaign to sell the Red Delicious centered on the idea that the color red is an indication of ripeness in apples, regardless of variety.

Photo by Gracie

Growers all over the country started to select trees that produced the reddest fruit without selecting for taste or nutrient value. Because of the mono-culture around apples, today the Red Delicious is among many apples plagued by diseases and pests, making it very difficult to grow organically.

The Washington Growers didn’t choose the Red Delicious because of it’s nutritional value, or even because of it’s flavor. They chose it because it doesn’t store well and doesn't show bruises. They chose it primarily because Washington State has the best climate in the country for growing Red Delicious apples.

Too Much Maize

Corn is another crop that has gone the way of the mono-culture. A quick internet search finds you over 100 varieties of corn, or maize, yet all we grow in this country is sweet corn and feed corn.

Photo by Jimmedia