Food Illustration: What You Need to Know to Get Started

1. Trailer: [MUSIC] Hi, guys. My name is Olga. I'm an illustrator, graphic designer, educator, and busy mom. For now, I'm focusing on food illustration and I would like to share some tips and tricks with you. This short class will be covered briefly seven aspects of creating food illustration. We won't draw this time but we'll talk about what you need to know and understand to create harmonious food illustrations. This class is suitable for you if you're a very beginner. It aims to make a process of creating food illustration a little easier and clearer for you. Welcome to my class. Hope you will enjoy it. 2. References: The first thing I'd like to say is the drawing from a photo is absolutely fine. Don't push yourself to make everything from your imagination, memory. Our head doesn't, and cannot contain every single thing in the world. To draw something from your head, you first need to see the object somewhere, and then draw it many times. Therefore, until you draw the same object many times, you will have hard times drawing it from memory. That is just how our brain works. Where to get references? There are several main ways. Your own images. Take pictures of your food from different angles, save them to a separate folder on your phone. Do this even if you're not going to draw it right away. You may want to use it later or you may need a reference of a specific product which was part of your dish. For example, a tomato with bruschetta or arugula that was on your pizza. References from Pinterest or Instagram. You can draw on someone else photos from Pinterest or Instagram, but be sure to find the other. Also, don't forget that if you draw from someone's photo and then sell it, it is a potential copyright infringement. Whenever possible, always check with the owner on the terms of use and license. Using photos from free stocks is the best and easiest option, but it's also important to look at the license. Examples of such free stocks, my favorite one, unsplash.com, pixabay.com, pexels.com. A small tip. Try to combine parts from different photographs, thus creating your own original illustration. If you know the basics, then you can easily connect parts from different photos. Something from one, something from another. In this case, you can use images from both Pinterest and Instagram. 3. Sketches: To create a harmonious composition, you often need to work on your sketches and make several downscaled drafts-thumbnails. So you feel the idea better and which option is the best fit. Those draft sketches can be of varying degrees of detail, just make it in the way you feel comfortable. Sometimes I only do a draft sketch of the main objects and shapes. Sometimes I elaborate a bit more on details. For example, a more detailed draft is required if you draw on a commercial illustration. It will help you to plan and see how the final result will look like. Usually, thumbnails are small, but understanding how large the final illustration needs to be is crucial. It will help you to maintain color and volume while transferring the final sketch to the paper. Try some different scales to find the one that fits you most. 4. Angle: It's also very important to choose a harmonious angle when creating a food illustration. A correct angle allows you to show food from the best side, from above, slightly from the side, etc. The angle is chosen in each specific case, depending on what you are drawing. There will be one angle for the salad, another for a piece of cake, and a third for pancakes. There is no silver bullet here, no things like," this angle works good for X, another one is best for [inaudible]." You will train this feeling over time by looking through the references. But if the photo makes you feeling hungry and willing to eat the object, that's definitely a good one. Also you can try to take different pictures from different angles of a same dish. You'll have a set of images to see the difference and pick the best angle. 5. Understanding The Basics: Why is it so important to know the basics of drawing, and sketching, and illustration? All objects in food illustration have some shape and volume. To avoid unnecessary flatness in your sketches, you need to know the basics of creating volume on simple shapes and single objects. Let's take an apple as an example. It is a ball. If we don't know how to build volume on a simple ball, we will not be able to draw an apple. Cucumber is a cylinder. We get the point. Next crucial thing is a knowledge of perspective. A bruschetta on a board is about the perspective. A piece of cake on a plate is also about it. Well, almost any illustration of multiple objects is about the perspective. Therefore, knowledge of the basic drawing principles is necessary. 6. Forming The Volume: For a food illustration not to be flat, you need to understand what are the light, shadows falling shadow, glare, reflex, etc. Because without glare and shadows, your illustration will look flat and not three-dimensional. My advice, add shadows freely just as you draw, but don't be afraid to keep at the bright highlights unpainted almost until the end. Because while we can make our shadows darker and deeper to fix things at any moment, making areas brighter is almost impossible without ruining the whole illustration. All you can do with painted areas at the end is adding little details with white gel pen or matte soft highlights with a soft white pencil. Therefore, shadows and highlights should be considered in advance. 7. Understanding Colors: When we look at an illustration, we perceive it through overall coloring. Therefore, for food illustration, you should choose delicious colors. For the illustration, you usually go with warm ones but still such cold colors as turquoise, pink, purple, are used for berries, colored drinks such as cocktails, milkshakes, and so on. You will need a lot of reds and warm browns, light whitish-yellowish sheds, several different greens, a couple of blues, shades of gray. This set will allow you to paint pastries, coffee, chocolate, bread, fruits, and berries. It's better not to use unappetizing dirty colors, such as tan, greenish-brown, and so on. As a tip, is to show shadows in food illustrations with the same shade, but darker. Otherwise, just use the warm gray. Cool gray, in most cases, should be only used for falling shadows. 8. Stylistics: We can create food illustrations in different styles; simplified and sketchy detailed, and photorealistic. We can decide whether we do the black outline or not, will we paint the whole illustration or just one object and so on, so on. If you find it difficult to start with detailed illustrations, make your illustration more sketchy and add a black outline. That gives a certain stylization and without the outline, you usually get a more realistic illustration. Often, the outline adds weight to the illustration. If you need to keep the airiness, then skip it. Another option is to add the outline only to the front objects. Basically the dark outline always highlights the object. Also, you can color only the main part of your illustration and leave the rest only in the outline. I really like this technique. It allows you to create a complete composition but without a detailed working of each object. Or you can carefully elaborate the main object in color and slightly tint the rest. The last thing is lettering. It decorates the illustration especially sketching and gives the composition certain completeness. 9. Class project: This class aims to make the process of creating food illustrations a little easier and clearer for you. As a class project, I want to hear the thoughts and insights that you gathered from this class. Also what point is more important in your opinion. Of course you can try to apply this new information in your illustration right away. Compare your experiences and share your thoughts and results. 10. Next steps: Now you know what to pay attention to when creating food illustrations. I hope that now the process of creating food illustration has become a little easier and clearer for you. Now you can start creating. If you are ready to dive a little deeper and try to create food illustrations with markers, I invite you to join my other classes. In which we draw delicious cupcakes, a piece of cake, and sweet croissants. Of course, thank you for watching and your positive feedback.