[Photograph: Paintyourpizza.com]
I'm sure most of us would agree that pizza-making is an art, but how about pizza as art? The recent launch of Paintyourpizza.com takes "custom toppings" to a whole new, utterly terrifying level: At long last, there exists the perfect platform from which to unleash your inner creative preschooler on poor, innocent pizzas.
It's simple, really. Visit Paintyourpizza.com, illustrate your wildest pizza concepts (in an app that bears an uncanny resemblance to MS Paint circa 1998), and then have that edible masterpiece delivered to your door for a mere $36.
WAIT! Before you rush off to self-express, let it be known that you can't order the actual pizzas just yet. But creator Jonas Lund is hard at work with New York's Ray's Pizza to turn your pie fantasies into horrifying pie reality. Once things get going, he hopes to expand nationwide, and the process is slated to look more or less like this:
Paint Your Pizza
Paint Your Pizza from Jonas Lund on Vimeo.
In the off chance that this isn't glaringly obvious, it's worth mentioning that Lund hasn't always been about pizza — as you may have noted, it doesn't appear that you even get to specify what toppings are represented by the array of 7 colors on the site (we're dying to know what they use for purple). The artist's original concept was The Paintshop, described on his site as "a real time collaborative painting tool offering you the possibility to sell your artworks and buy great pieces of art for very competitive prices."
According to The Creator's Project, a severe shortage of interested buyers (a mere 3 paintings were purchased from a selection of over 3,500 works) prompted Lund to make some changes to his business model. The Swedish transplant may have settled on a more buzz-worthy medium, but it remains to be seen how this newest endeavor fares. Suffice it to say that we'll be revisiting this particular topic the moment those pizzas are available for purchase. In the meantime, let us know what you'd like to see on a Serious Eats-painted pie!
About the author:Niki Achitoff-Gray is the editor of Slice and a part-time student at The Institute of Culinary Education. She like offal. A lot.