Culinary Canvas - Pesto Pasta Illustration

1. Pasta Illustration Intro: Hi, I'm Katie Sinclair. I'm an illustrator, surface pattern designer, and architect living in Houston, Texas. My work is a mix of watercolor with pins. I love drawing from everyday life. One of my passions is cooking, which inspired this pasta lesson. To start, I encourage you to set your pencil down and pick your pin up. We are going to embrace this journey together and learn how to work with our own unique drawing style. In this class, I'll teach you how to draw and water color this pasta recipe illustration from start to finish. To begin, we will walk through how to mix water colors using basic techniques. We'll create a swatch for each of our water colors on our paper. And learn how to use water color without worrying about the final illustration. We'll move into walking through step by step, how to draw each of these ingredients using a pen. I walk you through with basic instructions. It's very simple to follow along with each of these ingredients. Next, we'll add lettering using the same pen and we'll fill in the blanks on the paper. The last and final step that you'll learn is how to add water color to your illustration to help bring it to life. You don't have to have any prior experience to create this painting. My goal for you is that at the end of this class, you'll have your very own pasta recipe illustration. It will look different from anyone else's and you'll learn to love your own unique style. 2. Supply Walkthrough: Hey everyone, This is Katie and welcome to the culinary campus. For this video, I'm going to run through everything that you need to get started with your recipe doodle. First thing that you will need is your set of water colors. I have a recommendation based on what I'll be using today. This palette was actually pulled from the Windsor and Newton Sketchers paint box, which has 12 different colors. Two yellows, two reds, two blues, two greens, and then a few browns with a white. I'll go through how to mix your colors in the next video. You'll also need two sheets of paper. One will be used for your drawing, the second will be used for testing out your colors. Doing a little exercise with me to get started. If you have a scrap piece of paper you'd rather use, please feel free. You'll also need a micron pin, which is a waterproof ink pin. I'm using a size three, a watercolor brush. For this video, I'm using a Vinci Nova size five optional pencil eraser. You can just use a mechanical pencil with an eraser up to you. You don't need a pencil for this exercise. A paper towel is great and of course a cup of water so you can water color. For today's class, I'll be mixing water colors in the lid of my watercolor palette. Most palettes, you can open up and mix directly in the lid. If for some reason you have a palette that doesn't have a lid, you can grab just a normal plate. Just make sure it's not a paper plate. Ceramic plate or dinner plate works great. Stay tuned and I'll see you at the next video. 3. Watercolor Exercises: As a warm up, we're going to create a Swatch sheet and a color mixing chart. We know exactly what's happening with our water colors as we mix them up. Something that I always use in my water colors is a cheat sheet that I create. This lives in the lid of my watercolor palette. I've found that if I see them on paper, it's a lot easier to understand what the color looks like before putting it on paper itself. Sometimes these blues look really similar in the pan, but once you put them on paper, you can actually see the difference. I like to keep my swatches in the exact same order as the colors, and we'll start by creating that. This is also a really good way to get a feel for what colors are really dark, what colors need a lot of water, and what colors maybe are a little bit more difficult to see. To get started first tip is to make sure your brush is wet. You don't need to baby it. You can get all the bristles wet, Swirl it at the bottom and just give it a little tap on the side so you're not dripping. And then go into your color. You can apply it directly on the paper. Between each color you need to wash your brush off entirely, clean it off. Grab the next color. I like to keep these about the same size as the pan next to it. The colors I'm using right now are from the Windsor and Newton Sketchers paint box. I really like it because it contains two of everything. Two yellows, two reds, two blues, two greens. It makes it easier to mix the colors. I think that if you have too many colors, it's easier to create mud accidentally. If you have fewer colors, you're less prone to create that muddy effect. You can see that this blue here, it's really, really intense versus this yellow, same amount of water. Just some colors have a lot more pigment than others. When I go to the second row, I'm going to keep them in the same order as my palette. So this green is next to the yellow. I have a few different browns in my palette. These are handy. I like having a couple different browns just so it's easier to mix. If you have a palette that doesn't have Brown, I will show you how to mix it. Also, to note this Windsor and Newton palette doesn't have black, which honestly is great. I'll teach you how to make a gray, which is what I use in all of my paintings. It's a trick I learned that helps create a little bit more dimension in your shadows. Okay, so now we have all of our colors on the sheet of paper that match the order of our palette. 4. Watercolor Mixing - Color Wheel: Now that we have our colors all swatched out on our paper, the next step that we're going to do is create a mini color wheel. This is really simple to create. All you have to do is take your yellows, your reds, your blues and your greens. And you'll create a circle almost with spokes coming out of it. This way, we'll be able to tell how the colors relate to one another. If you happen to have a palette that has more than two yellows or more than two reds, just pick two of each color. Or if you have just one of a certain color, some palettes only have one blue. That's okay, we'll just do one blue. The key here is not to do too many colors in your color circle. To get started, I'm going to work again, starting with the yellow. And then we'll work down ending with the green, With my yellow. I'm going to get another swatch. I'm going to start at 12:00 and create a vertical stripe. Next, I'll use the second yellow at about 01:00 And make sure you clean your brush off again between each of these, at 03:00 we're going to do this orangey red. It might look orange to you, but for this exercise, we're going to consider it an orangey red. Next, we'll pick this purplish red, and this will go about 4-5 o'clock. All right, next is a blue, the first blue in our palette. This will go at 06:00 Directly opposite but that yellow, the second blue will go 7-8 Then this first green at the top will go at 09:00 This green will go about 10.11 This is your cheat sheet color wheel. Basically what's happening is you have the primary colors, which are yellow, blue, and red. And they're mixing together to create greens, oranges, and purples. The problem that a lot of people have with water colors is they will create a muddy color accidentally. Why does that happen? What's going on is when you accidentally mix colors completely opposite each other from the color wheel. This really intense blue with this orange yellow will create a muddy effect. It's helpful if you want to do a shadow. This is an easy hack to figure out a shadow color. Same with red and green will create a shadowy color. This warm blue. And this cool yellow will create a muddy color as well. Muddy colors are great when you want it to be more life like. For example, a foresty green. To do that, you take this green with a tiny bit of this red and you'll get a really pretty foresty green. We'll do that in today's video, where we'll talk about different colors of green and how to mix them. You can keep this to the side of your paper just to reference and know that, okay, this blue with this orange will give me a shadow color. Let's do a quick shadow exercise right now. For this one, I am going to mix this orange color with this blue color. Again, the further apart they are, the more muddy it's going to be. To do that, I'm going to grab some orange on my brush and go to my palette, smear it off. Then I'm going to take a little bit of this blue. Because this blue is so strong, it doesn't need a whole lot. Now, I've got these two colors and I already have blue on my brush. I'm just going to mix a little on the side, clean it up and mix it together. Keep adding a little bit more orange or a little bit more blue. And eventually you'll get this really pretty gray color, that's these two colors mixed together. It might take a little bit of time to figure out what ratio. For me, it's about 70% of this orange to 30% of this blue. Just because this blue is so strong. If you have a few minutes, I would love it if you guys would experiment with mixing greens with reds. This bluish green with this orangey red color. And see what happens, see what shadow color you like the best. All right, I'll see you in a few minutes to start the pin drawing of our doodle. 6. Adding Lettering: Last step with our pen is to add in the lettering. For this, I encourage you to use whatever lettering you feel most comfortable with. I like to do a mix of all caps and script. A strategy that I use when I'm creating these food drawings is I use the lettering to fill in these blank spots that naturally happen when you're drawing. If you have a really large blank spot, don't feel the need to copy the lettering exactly as I have it here. You can move it around to suit your style. First, I'm going to do the San Marzano Tomatoes. You can vary the size of your lettering, can vary the shape. Right Then I'm going to do olive oil above it. I'm doing a combination of script and upper case. And then in the middle of my drawing, I had some extra space. There's one more ingredient that doesn't really have a food to draw with it, it's just a bunch of specks and that's salt and pepper. I like to do the wording first and then fill around it with these little speckles. There's my salt and pepper. And then I'll add in some almost tiny circles, they don't have to be perfect, brown salt and pepper. Then I'll do my basil garlic. Feel free to make this your own. By no means do you have to follow exactly what I'm doing. My goal with this lesson is to teach you how to make it in your own style. If you have a recipe that you want to draw later, you can follow my exact steps that I used to get to a final drawing. That's it for your pen. Once you finish exercise, you will no longer need your pen. Feel free to put it away. Make sure you have a clean cup of water ready to go. And I'll see you in the next video.