Assignment !0: Self-Directed Project: In the Kitchen - Initial research

This assignment is self-directed and gives us the opportunity to work with our own creative processes and consolidate our learning from the unit as a whole. Having said that, there are some requirements and guidelines. This is a good thing! Limitations are so good for my creative practice. They give me somewhere to begin, a way to push aside the spiralling chaos of limitless choice. For example, if I choose a limited colour palette, I immediately remove the worry over which colours to use. For this assignment there are three options. Perhaps because it’s the brief with most requirements/constraints, I’ve chosen the option entitled “In the kitchen”. 

In brief, we are asked to create illustrations for a spread in a weekend supplement magazine with recipes on the theme of ‘everyday foods of the world’. For clarification, the instructions say that we can interpret the theme quite loosely. The illustrations are to have a sketchbook feel and be an inventive record and celebration of food. They are to have a creative, relaxing and dynamic approach to cooking with a fresh and journalistic feel. We are encouraged to investigate our fridge and kitchen cupboards for ingredients, spices, cooking implements, tablecloths and crockery  Also, we can draw with food! Foods such as beetroot and tea make dyes and we can use lemons or potatoes for printing. We can collage with, or draw onto, food packaging, labels, paper bags and so on. The list of possibilities is not exhaustive, and I hope it is not also prescriptive. Anyway, it seems to relish the experimental - hmm, can I draw with relish too?

With all these possibilities to explore I needed a starting point. As I had them close to hand, I decided to begin by seeing how other illustrators have worked with recipes and food illustration in magazines  I flipped through back copies of Slimming World magazine, looking for layout options and use of processes other than photography for illustrating food. While photography will form a significant part of my research, my reading of the brief suggests that they’re not looking for food photography as an end product. Here are some pages that I found interesting:

For recipe layout options I found these:

Above q images: Slimming World magazine Jan/Feb 2022, p30-33

Slimming World magazine July  2022, p 56-57

Slimming World magazine July 2022, p 46-47.

It looks as though four recipes is about the most that will fit comfortably on a double page spread. Mostly these are illustrated by photographing the meals, but in the third example I like the way that ingredients have been used as subject matter for illustration.

I also looked at drawings and digital illustration in the same magazines:

Slimming World magazine May/June 2022, p 40-41. Illustrations by Sara Thielker.

I like the way that the space has been used, with a large image too left and border illustration surrounding the edges of the spread. It looks very cheerful and attractive, though, as ever, I would prefer more tonal variation. However, that isn’t the style being used and the more designed look works well.

Slimming World magazine Jan/Feb 2022 p 17-18. Illustrations by Carmen Johnson.

These drawings have more of a sketchbook feel to them. I like the use of hand-drawn text for labels, giving them a relaxed and more playful feel. The small drawings of paired products work really well together. They suggest a relationship between the food and drink items, giving a more relational and relatable aspect.

Slimming World magazine Jan/Feb 2022, p27-28. Illustrations by Carmen Johnson.

Also by Carmen Johnson, I like the way these illustrations show different food scenarios, progressing from the greengrocer to the chopping board then into the frying pan and onto the plate. The relaxed and colourful style gives real visual appeal to the article and tells its own story of the shopping and cooking process.

I looked online at Good Food magazine to see if it had a different visual approach, but images were mostly photography and nothing stood out to me as being particularly innovative. Here is a sample screenshot:

The spread at bottom centre creates visual interest by varying the image sizes, but I prefer the layouts from Slimming World because they have more of a sense of pattern.

Following on from the magazine research, I looked more specifically at food illustrators. I confined my searches to non-photographic sources to begin looking more at sketchbook-like art. With these artists, it wasn’t easy to find good referencing as many post on social media with nicknames rather than actual names, and so there isn’t anything much resembling traditional publication data.

Firstly, here is work by Laura Balcerek, a Glasgow-based artist who posts as laurab-design. 

This example of her work shows a cooked breakfast in the context of a full breakfast table. I prefer this to the more isolated food items by Sam Thielker above. Even the small plate of tarts has its design marked on. The design is deceptively simple-looking, but there’s a lot to see on the second or third glance.

This lovely basket of fruit is by Deb Choi. It contrasts with Balcerek’s work as it’s removed from its context, but I like the tonal quality of the illustration.it somehow manages to look both fresh and nostalgic. 

I enjoyed looking at these quirky illustrations by Olga Svart, an illustrator based in Moscow. The first image is both sculptural and whimsical, and the illustration directly above seems to be a step by step illustration until we look more closely. There is a story book feel to these illustrations which would, perhaps, be undesirable for a magazine spread on recipes.

Next I looked at the work of someone I could only find reference to as tubik_arts. 

I like the inclusion of the cooks in the top image. Both images have a pleasing colour palette. The lower image has a lovely sense of pattern, as does the next illustrator I looked at, Laura Silveira.

These shapes and patterns are so engaging - I particularly like the circular frame. I also like the inclusion of text within the images. The words look hand drawn, which is a good reference for the sketchbook style I’m looking for.

After having looked at drawing and digital illustration, I then looked at collage art  I loved the warmth of the images below by Roy Scott.

https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/939793/view

They have a painterly feel which I’m not sure whether it has been made physically or digitally. However, no matter how drawn I am to these images, I think they would be more suited to a cafe wall than a magazine article. In a magazine article the illustrations need to support the text rather than claim centre stage, and I think looking at these images would be so engaging that i wouldn’t look at the recipes  

I went on to look at the work of Megan Coyle, who has her own website at www.megancoyle.com  

As the screenshots show, these are collages on paper created using coloured papers. This technique is the same as my collage process, so these collages are of particular interest to me. There is an impressionist feel to these collages and they look quite different when viewed from a distance or up close. However, the cutting and piecing of these pieces of paper is painstakingly precise.I think, for the purposes of my magazine spread, I would like to have less of a hard rectangle as a frame so that the images can sit more comfortably within the text.

These collages by Danielle Vaughan are less figurative though still recognisable as a muffin/basket of fruit. The technique of placement of coloured papers is similar, but looser. I like the freedom of these collages and their liveliness. It can be easy to err too much towards realism in illustration. 

Kathy Fitzgerald’s approach is similar, but with the addition of printed papers which have in some cases been painted and decorated with mark-making  The use of found text gives the opportunity for found poetry or comment, and can either be highlighted or knocked back as the practitioner desires in order to achieve their purpose.

Lastly I looked at the work of Candy Jernigan. She died in 1991 so she doesn’t have a website, however various sites have pages that showcase her images, installations and sketchbook pages. At times she used the food items themselves as art media. 

These are all from dailyartfair.com. A lot of her work seems to be a sort of artistic cataloguing of foodstuffs and packaging. The placement of brightly coloured packaging on rather murky and subdued backgrounds gives an interesting juxtaposition which feels a bit unnerving. This is probably not the feel that the magazine editor of our fictional brief would be looking for!

This concludes this part of my research. In my next post I will try to get closer to the work for this brief by looking at words and spiders.