Recipe illustration

The flapjack.

For this brief I have to create a recipe entirely out of illustration, No words or numbers. I was set the task of creating a tray bake and recording each step through photography to help aid me in eventually making a recipe from it. I decided to make a flapjack as it seemed simple enough to make.

Not too excited about how the flapjack ended up looking but that doesn't mean I cant make the illustration look yummy!

Artists influence.

Fresh Made Simple, Katie Eberts.

I came across this artist who has illustrated an entire book of recipes similar to what I aim to create. Unfortunately she uses words in her recipes but that doesn't mean I cannot take inspiration! I love how whimsical her watercolour style is and I also really enjoy how the ingredients fall down the page into the final pot or bowl.
I would like to take from this to make my illustrations flow from one side of the page to the other.

Sophie peanut

I love the layout and overall feel of these pieces from Sophie, The images flow well from one side to the other. I also like how she has incorporated other aspects to her drawings, like the type of people who would eat the foods. I may include a kind of mascot with my recipe illustration. Either that or incorporate something into the background to pull the imagery together like show above.

Initial ideas.

I enjoy how soft the watercolour illustrations look but im not too pleased with the colours. Theyre not really as clean as id have hoped, I am planning on using mainlypastels with my illustrations.

After my lecture on informative design I decided to have a little look into more of an infographic look.

I created a rough (and rather wobbly) bar chart here to show the ingredient amounts in relation to eachother. I think this is a good way to look at amounts but considering i cannot base this off even grams along the Y axis I don't think I will be taking it forward.

I actually really like how these look, both in black and white and in colour. I wanted to look at creating more simplistic instructions.. Like how you would get with a set of drawers you have to put together for example. These images are much more informative and easy to follow although they don't have enough personality for my liking just yet !

I turned to my ipad to look at giving my illustrations more character and I love the result!

Digitally painting is not my favorite type by far but I am very impressed with how the textures and colours look compared to watercolour, especially considering these are just rough mockups. I think working digitally would give me an advantage also with composition as I could easily move around my sketches to find what fits best.

Further research.

ingredient clipart, collected from google images.

I like the idea of using pastel and possibly more earthy pastel colours for this recipe. It would be more inviting and friendly, I also think it would compliment the theme too (flapjack!).

I started the sketches shown here with the witch idea but I still wasn't happy with the idea very much. I think this would look much nicer as part of a story almost. Id like it to feel like a little look into the witches life, I might achieve this by adding a scene or comic book like panels.

I only added very rough colouring to these and I am really liking how its looking. I have also changed the cat idea into these little goblin creatures as I think this is much more fairy tale like.. I would like to fill the room up more in my final drawing to make it even more witchy and cluttered. I was also very happy with the idea of the witch feeding her little goblin the flapjack.

I wanted to test out how digital art would look with this project one last time. I'm not mad at how these test sketches turned out but I definitely think that traditional would look much better. In my feedback it was suggested that I revisit my watercolour works earlier on in the project and develop that Idea. I am going to work on doing just that to bring my story to life in the final piece.

To help tackle the last part of this project I decided to create a Pinterest board full of witchy illustrations. This helped inspire my own illustrations and witchy room. When I think witch I think messy room full of books and potions, I would love to portray this in my final piece.

I made two watercolour illustrations mock ups of how I would like to portray my recipe. I am very happy with the outcome. Watercolour seems to naturally give off a storybook aesthetic that Iove and I look forward to working with it much more.

These are the two final large thumbnails I made to base my final piece off. I wanted to be happy with how things where placed before drawing it large scale. I think the composition overall turned out lovely.

The final piece!

I am very happy with how this final piece turned out! I love the story behind the recipe, I feel that I managed to add depth to each of the characters without any words at all. This project was definitely a favourite of mine so far as I pushed myself and ended with an outcome much better then I originally thought I would produce.