Saturday

A Classic Go-To Recipe

First Assignment: Draw a Recipe - Click to enlarge
In my first restaurant, the menu changed daily. It was a limited menu with one soup, one appetizer, three main courses, and one dessert.

When I was out of ideas (or time) for an appetizer, the life-saving dish was Egg Mimosa. It was delicious, the customers loved it, and my kitchen helper liked to make it because it was easy. A truly winning combination!

So when I learned that I had to illustrate a recipe for Draw It Like It's Hot, it was the first thing that came to mind--even after forty years!

One of my fellow students--a French girl--wrote that she made many of those eggs as a child. That reminded me that it's a perfect dish for a child's lunch, just add a slice of whole-grain bread and you've got a pretty complete meal.





Learning How To Draw Food Is Fun!!

Some of my best memories as a French chef have to do with how beautiful food can look. Not as an elaborate finished dish--in its natural state.

Let's face it: food is beautiful!

I remember so vividly the huge stock pot with its vegetables and herbs floating on top. The trays of strawberries at the farmers' market where I went every day when I had my first restaurant. The displays at the cheese shop. A colourful salad.

After that, when I travelled through Europe, I marvelled at the variety and artistry of the fruit and vegetable displays in Italy, and wondered at the immense piles of parsley at the public market in Ibiza. What on earth did the Catalans make that required so much parsley?

From chef to food illustrator seemed like a natural transition, so when I found out about Koosje Koene's Draw It Like It's Hot, I just had to sign up. $69 for four weeks: my kind of price!

The first week of the current session ends tomorrow. For my first week's assignments, I submitted these two sketches:

"Shopping List" - Did you notice it's in alphabetical order?
"Afternoon Snack" - The real point of this is the reflection of the outdoor scene in the knife.

I am doing all my sketches for these classes in a new Strathmore Series 500 Mixed Media Sketchbook, 5 ½" by 8" (14 by 20 cm). It's not perfect, and the "portrait" format is a nice change from the Moleskine's "landscape" orientation, but the Moleskine's paper is better for wet media.

These few weeks of art classes are the most fun I've had in a long, long time!



Sunday

The Perils Of Drawing With Ink

This is a self-imposed assignment that I gave myself because I'm between courses this week-end. Sketchbook Skool ended on Friday, and Koosje Koene's Draw It Like It's Hot starts on Monday.

Compare the copy with the original*, and you'll see why if it hadn't been for Tommy Kane's voice in my head, saying "Finish the Drawing!", I would have scrapped my first attempt.

Oh, well, those are the perils of drawing with ink--as in no pencils allowed at all!

Click to enlarge


Click to enlarge

By the way, if you can't find the mistake at first glance, you're in good company (maybe)! When I uploaded the sketch to the skool site, Tommy himself commented, "If you didn't say anything I would never have noticed." Perhaps he was just being nice.

I can't help wondering if and how the mistake could have been avoided by using Marc Taro Holmes' "dot plotting" technique--if only I could figure out how to apply it to my own drawings.

The other part that bothered me was how the words "Ontario Fruit" had turned out. I must have been very tired when I got there--the drawing took several hours--and afterwards I felt I could have done better.

So this morning I re-did that part. Just to see if I could. I'm glad I didn't realize I would spend HOURS copying two words!

As an exercise in patience and "seeing" (looking at the shapes, not the subject), it was worth it, and I like how it turned out--don't you?

Pilot Drawing Pen, Watercolour Pencil (for the red),
Tombow Calligraphy Pen (for the black)

* I took the photo afterwards; the drawing was done from the actual basket.


Wednesday

Last Week Of Sketchbook Skool

We all fell in love with this last week's instructor, Tommy Kane, and tried our very best to get his approval on our assignment, which was to draw our own kitchen, in his own style, following his rules:

  • No pencil lines, only ink
  • Slow down (take at least 4 hours to do the sketch)
  • Ignore the mistakes and finish the drawing

This is what I came up with:


Tommy liked it.

Friday

About Sketching Animals

Did I tell you I had signed up for a klass at the Sketchbook Skool?

Yes, I did. 

Four weeks done, two to go--and so far, so good.

I loved Danny Gregory, the artist, the teacher, the philosopher, the person.

Koosje Koene was her usual delightful self.

Prashant Miranda was a joy to discover.

Jane LaFazio has so many talents she makes my head spin.

This week, we've got Roz Stendhal (how do you get such a literary last name?), and she's into animals. Trouble is, I'm not.

Don't get me wrong: I love animals. On my farm, I loved my dog and my goats and my chickens and my turkeys and all the birds that came to visit and the howl of the coyotes at night; in downtown Montreal, I was delighted that a family of skunks had elected domicile under my shed; and here I love to watch the deer and the foxes in my backyard, and the moose in the woods; I feed the hummingbirds and photograph the goldfinches....

But I'm not interested in sketching them!

Watercolor on 5" x 8" Moleskine notebook
Click to enlarge

However, I'm paying for practising my sketching, so today I made this animal sketch in my journal.

The text at the top says: "This is going to be a difficult klass for me because I am not interested in animals unless they are food. (Sorry about that!)"