Hot Fruit Sandwich

Just in time for Thanksgiving the new Cookin’ with Coolio book is out on the shelves. When Coolio and his team needed dinnerware as funky as the chef they chose Ink Dish’s Irezumi pattern by Paul Timman.

“If you like to laugh, eat delicious food, and do it all on a budget, Cookin’ with Coolio is the ultimate cookbook for you.” – Craig Ferguson

Check out Irezumi adding color to Coolio’s hot fruit sandwich above and karate chicken below. In the book Coolio describes how the hot fruit sandwich was born:

“I was having a meeting with some TV executives in my house. I was gonna make them dinner and let ‘em know that I wasn’t f&#@ing around. But when they arrived, I was lookin’ over my menu and I hadn’t planned anything for dessert. So I tucked my head into the refrigerator and pulled out everything I could find. It ended up being delicious.”

To get the recipe pick up Cookin’ with Coolio. Thanks to Elan Gale for putting Ink Dish together with the “ghetto gourmet”.

Karate Chicken

Ink dish has gone international. Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and Commissaires in Montreal are now both carrying Ink Dish modern dinnerware.

Art Gallery of Ontario (Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario) is one of the largest art museums in North America with 480,000 sq ft of physical space. 5 years ago AGO embarked on a $250 million redevelopment plan led by famed architect Frank Gehry.

Inside the building is housed “Massacre of the Innocents” by Peter Paul Rubens, “Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet” by Tintoretto, and works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and Sculptor Henry More among many, many others.

In the gift shop you can find works by such greats as Paul Timman.

Commissaires – is  a gallery, a museum and a design-forward gift shop, all in one.

“The idea was to sell design in another context – a store that acts as a gallery, said owner-curator Pierre Laramée, who opened on St. Laurent Blvd. near Fairmount St. four years ago as a rush of designers was putting Mile End on the style map. Works are typically shown for about three months, and are augmented by more accessible, permanent items like furniture, jewellery and scent. There are occasional photography exhibits, as well.” – Montreal Gazette

If you’re going to enter a new market, you might as well start at two of the top spots for design gifts in the country.

I’ve been asked a few times now how we put Paul’s artwork onto the plates so I thought I’d share it with everyone.

As anyone who’s been Inked can tell you, the tattoo starts it’s life as a drawing by the tattoo artist, it’s just an outline really. The artist draws onto a transferable paper and it becomes a stencil that goes onto your skin in the desired area. The magic begins when the artist puts needle to skin and blends colours and shades all free hand directly onto your flesh.

Tattooing plates was obviously a bit different. We were given the artwork as a basic stencil, and as beautiful and intricate as Paul’s drawings are we had to digitally add the colours and shading with photoshop. Paul’s drawing came with instructions on the various techniques and styles of shading and the colurs typically used in tattooing.  Once we had perfected that with the tattooists approval, the digital images were ready to send onto the factory for production and then that’s a whole other story for another time.