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!

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