I'm sharing this fictitious cookbook project intro because it addressed a real concern we had at the time: young professionals who don't know how to cook, tend to waste a ton of food in the process of learning, and also want to lower their food costs.
As part of a team of four creatives that tackled this fascinating project, my role revolved mostly around creating the art for the book. This resulted in a couple of sample illustrations and a trend board to demonstrate the mood of what is essentially an interactive cookbook.
The Concept
In general, food photography dominates cookbooks pretty heavily. Since our target market is interested in interacting with something both "fun," and functional, I took inspiration from visual journals, travel sketchbooks and visual journalism to come up with the initial book design and page layout concepts.
In reality though, I also needed a quick way to record two meals in under 3-4 hours - because that's all the time I had let at crunch time.
I ended up going back to a looser, urban sketchy style of watercolor, pen and ink to put ideas on paper quickly. I started developing this style during my urban sketching escapades with Twin-Cities Urban Sketchers, in Minneapolis and later in Boston.
This technique also helped me capture my wonderful food experience at "French Meadow Cafe & Bakery."
Fun fact: I loved this piece so much, I ended including that last piece in my Commencement Show!
There are two full-page, watercolor food illustrations in the Kitchen Magic series designed as a double page spread. I do a full deep dive about it in this blog post:
Illustration Case Study: Step-by-Step Process for KITCHEN MAGIC Interactive Cookbook Artwork
Explore other food illustrations.
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Public Announcement: This blog post is part of a collection of 354+ posts from my original Wordpress blog "Dreaming Into Being" library. I've now retired and migrated it to “Wander & Paint,” my new blog post at the United Wanderlust art shop. As time allows, I will be reviewing, editing, condensing, updating and releasing a number of these blog posts but not all of them.
Some posts require more precision surgery than others. I'll also probably be publishing new posts as the muse wills it and father time allows. This whole process may take a while but I think these blog post serve as great documentation of my process and reminds me of certain milestones. So, most of them will be made available again- at some point.
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