Carl Warner Food Art

At first glance, these images look like painted landscapes, including towering hills, mad sea and stormy weather in the background. However, if you look a little more closely you will see that the sea and storm were made of cabbage, in other photo trees are broccoli

and the hills are baked potatoes. These aren't paintings but true photos! Also everything you can see in the photograph is made of real food! Pictures were

photographed by Carl Warner, a photographer who works in London, and who made specialty of these food landscapes or how I like to call them - 'foodscapes'. In recent

years he has been commissioned by many advertising agencies throughout Europe to produce his distinctive images for clients in the food industry. Each scene is

photographed in layers from foreground to background.

The process is very time consuming, and so the food quickly wilts under the lights. Carl originally began his career by going to art college, and thought he might become an

illustrator since he had a talent for drawing. However he discovered that he really enjoyed photography as a fast and exciting medium to work in.

Carl says "I tend to draw a very conventional landscape as I need to fool the viewer into thinking it is a real scene at first glance. It is the realization of what

the real ingredients are that brings a smile, and for me that's the best part." These images can take two or three days to build and photograph, with a couple more days spent

retouching and fine tuning the images to blend all the elements together. Carl devotes a lot of time to planning each image before he starts shooting, and he spends a lot of time

staring at vegetables in supermarkets, which can make him seem a little odd!

Baloons. Incredibly, everything you see in this image can be found in the kitchen. Photographer Carl Warner has painstakingly captured all kinds of food in a series of still lifes.

Sea. To give a realistic three-dimensional feel to the photographs, each still life is composed on a table measuring 8ft by 4ft. The foreground is only about 2ft across.

Broccoli. The Forest of Dean or the Forest of Greens? The road is paved with cumin, peas hang from broccoli trees and cauliflower clouds adorn the sky with bread for mountains.

Pasta. Edible ingredients in this Italian-inspired rural scene include a lasagne cart, fields of pasta, a pine nut wall, mozzarella clouds, trees of peppers and chillies and a parmesan village.

Cress. He says his 'Foodscapes' were partly inspired by healthy eating campaigns. But they have not persuaded his own children to take up the five-a-day pledge.

Salmon. The red sky at night in this landscape is actually made from salmon. The beautiful pea-green

boat wouldn't be out of place in Edward Lear's nonsense poem, 'The Owl and The Pussycat'.

Bacon. A winter landscape for carnivores - Parma ham and breadsticks are fashioned into a sled which is pulled across a snow-covered road made from a selection of cold meats.

Each scene is photographed in separate layers to prevent the food from wilting. "I like the way smaller aspects of nature resembled larger ones," says Carl Warner.