Hi everyone, my name is Nia and today I’m going to share with you a guide to watercolor textures and form for food illustration, specifically cakes for this class.

A lot of times when we paint, we like adding details but we forget about the core form of the items, which is actually key to making a painting cohesive as a whole and more realistic without adding too much detail. In this class I’m going to simplify this, so we can break it down into simpler, more actionable steps, that you can take, to tackle difficult looking subjects: in this case cakes, painted in efficient steps.

By understanding the form, we will capture the overall idea of the objects and then it’ll be much easier to allocate the colours like values, and of course the textures.

In this class I will share with you how I draw the shapes and angles of cakes, then we can use these simpler shapes for small thumbnail designs, incase you want to create a specific layout or composition. I’m going to show you how I brainstorm and look for references once we’ve decided what flavours we want to paint. Then we’re going to do small painting exercises; breaking down the values from the simple shapes of different examples of cake slices, learn about how to make the textures, design our own cake then finally putting it together into the final paintings.

I’m going to paint 3 flavours of cakes today in a cylindrical form, but hopefully from the previous lessons and exercises, you can also turn them into different shaped cake slices as well.

Originally I’ve made this class for all levels, as I go through a lot of the basics, and hopefully from there you can apply the techniques into cakes painted in your levels, however for the final painting, I will be painting in more detail which requires some understanding in paint consistency, brush load and things like that, so I’d recommend if you want to paint along to the final cakes, for you to have a bit of watercolor experience beforehand.

With this said, I've seen a lot of feedback from previous classes, where students tell me they’re very new to watercolors, and still managed to follow along to the project, so I would also welcome beginners to try and give this a go. I really tried my best to break down the steps, so hopefully it’s understandable for you to follow along.

Just as a disclaimer, I tend to cut and speed through parts of the drawing if I’m doing something repetitive or if my hand is off the frame, so I will be drawing and painting faster than normal and I also understand that everyone learn and paint at different speeds. So if you’re new to my classes, I would recommend for you to take a look through some of the lessons to get an idea of the flow and the pacing. Then once you’re ready to follow along to the exercises and paintings, I would suggest for you to pause in between each step, so you can draw, paint and repeat exercises without feeling rushed.

If this sounds like a class you’d be interested in taking, let’s start!

Zoe Ng

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