It Was Fun, But I'm Not Doing It Again!

The final assignment in Draw It Like It's Hot! -- Koosje Koene's online course in food drawing -- was to put together a recipe and submit it to They Draw And Cook, a website that describe itself as "Recipes illustrated by artists from around the world". And indeed, that's what it is.

I never imagined that I would agonize so much and for so long over such a simple order, but I did, and later I will give all the gory details, but for now I will just show you what I came up with in the end, and submitted to They Draw and Cook:

Click to enlarge.

Even though I cheated ever so slightly on the image proportions, my submission was accepted, and here is the proof: http://www.theydrawandcook.com/recipes/pickled-jalapeno-peppers-by-gina-bisaillon

For me, the best thing that came out of this project--several good things, really--among them:

1. I stuck it to the end, and finished the drawing. For this I have to thank Tommy Kane (see my previous entry about this and the Sketchbook Skool course); I kept hearing his voice in my head, saying "Finish the drawing!";

2. The picture of the jar turned out really nice, and in fact, because the whole thing is a collage, I will detach it and keep it as a small painting (the jar part is 3" x 3");

Watercolour and colour pencil on Arches hot press paper. Click to enlarge.

3. Although I used a photo of a jar as a model for the container, and I did cut a carrot to make sure I had the pattern right, everything else about that project came out of my imagination. Although this may not seem like such a feat to you, it's a breakthrough for me.

4. I learned to use all my different versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements to clean up a picture, and best of all, to stitch several parts of an image to create a panorama. You pretty well have to acquire this ability in order to submit a recipe to They Draw And Cook because most scanners will not accept anything longer than letter-size, and TDAC requires submissions to measure 16.66 inches wide and 6.25 inches high (5000 by 1875 pixels)!

This means that now I don't have to worry about photographing an object, a room, a landscape with a special app that I only have on my iPad! Instead, I can just use my regular camera--yay!

The They Draw And Cook website is a very successful project, but to tell the truth, even though most artists I know are pretty good cooks (as for me, I'm a retired chef and my recipe is one I actually use), if I'm going to look for a recipe I will first of all think of one from someone who is first a cook, then an artist maybe, but not the other way around!

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.

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