I’m feeling creative today, so I thought we’d do a bit of a Blue Peter style ‘make’ and show you how to create your own celebrity toast images.

Materials/Equipment.

To begin with you’ll need to get the follwing list of materials and equipment together…

A loaf of thick-sliced white bread, preferably a square sandwich loaf.

A grill.

A sheet of thin card. (This should be a couple of centimetres larger than your bread on all sides.)

A sheet of aluminium foil. (Large enough to cover the card completely.)

A pencil.

A craft knife or modelling scalpel. (Kids, remember to get a grown-up to help.)

A selection of black and white celebrity clip art.

Instructions.

Step 1 – Choose your celebrity.

If you’re doing this purely for fun, then you pretty much have a free choice of celebrities, subject to the availability of suitable clip art images or your own artistic talents. However, if you’re hoping to turn a bit of profit then there are one or two you may wish to consider carefully when choosing an suitable image.

Religion tends to provide a reliable, if not inexhaustible, supply of gullible marks, so religious imagery, and particularly images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and more recently deceased figures such as Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul II are good choices. If, however, you’re more interested in trying the Islamic market then its as well to remember that images of Mohammed are rather frowned upon so you’re better off looking for examples of the word ‘Allah’ in a nice Arabic script.

When it comes to rooking the media, and especially the tabloids, images of dead dictators and terrorists, i.e. Adolf Hitler, Colonel Gadaffi, Osama Bin Laden, etc. tend to go pretty well as do images of the royal family – it is a Jubilee year, after all. Celebrities are also fairly marketable, as well, if the image is distinctive enough, with the best profits tending to come from images of dead celebrities such Michael Jackson or Amy Winehouse – not only can they not sue for royalties or image rights but the fact that they’re dead adds a nice ‘supernatural’ element to the image that’s often guaranteed to pull in the suckers.

To get you started, I’ve included some sample images that should fit the bill pretty nicely…

Step 2 – Create your stencil.

Having chosen your image, you now need to create a suitable stencil.

Start by tracing your chosen image onto the piece of card, making sure that its small enough to fit comfortably onto a piece of bread. For added ‘authenticity’ is best if you place the image off-centre.

Next you need to cut out your stencil using a craft knife or modelling scalpel. If your kids are trying this remember that its not a good idea to let the use sharp implements without adult supervision – you’re making toast here, not sausages.

Don’t worry too much about accuracy when cutting out you stencil. You want to create an image the gives the impression of it being of a celebrity or religious figure not an exact likeness, so don’t be too concerned if your stencil is a little rough around the edges.

Finally, you need to cover your stencil in aluminium foil taking care to ensure that all the edges of the card, including those on the inside of the stencil, are adequately covered – you don’t want to accidentally set your stencil on fire when making your toast image.

You call fix the foil to the stencil with a few spots of glue, if you wish, but folding the foil over the edges of the stencils is usually enough to keep it in place.

Step 3 – Create your toast image.

Take a slice of bread and gently toast it under the grill on both sides, until it takes on a light golden brown base colour, like this…

Now place your stencil carefully over the piece of toasted bread and return it to the grill for a minute or two, until the exposed area has darkened to create your image, like this…

Step 4 – Make some money…

If you’ve gone for a bit of religious imagery then putting your toast image up for sale on eBay is an option, but for other celebrity images, especially those featuring dead celebrities and terrorists, your best option is likely to be to contact Dennis Rice Media, owners of moneyforyourstory.com – Dennis has previous experience of rooking the Daily Star with a toast image of Osama Bin Laden and is, therefore, well placed to know which tabloid editors are going to be desperate for a bit of cheap filler at any given moment…

…just remember to hide the stencil and swear blind that your picture shows exactly how the bread came out of the toaster, even if someone notices the absence of any lines in the image from the wire cage in which the bread sits.

You can also contact Dennis on Twitter via the @TabloidTroll account, just don’t tell him I sent you 😉

Next time…

…we’ll be getting a few tips from the editor and art director of the Daily Sport on how to Photoshop the head of a female celebrity on to the naked body of a porn star and run a front page story that that the celebrity is furious about the image when they barely even know the paper’s existence.