Folks, I need your help. I need suggestions for recipes to illustrate that use wild foods - and that are unanimously delicious - as opposed to being an acquired taste!
So, in college I worked on an exciting visual reportage project about wild foods. I illustrated, in watercolor, five delicious recipes that used foraged foods as one of the main ingredients. I called this new collection of artwork "Wild Dining Illustrated.
The subject fascinated me so much that I wanted to explore it more. To this day, I'm still working on it off and on.
If the stars align and I bring the collection to a reasonable conclusion, it's even possible that I could, eventually, compile all of them into an artist book.
In the meantime, who knows... depending on how tasty the recipes I discover are (according to me), I might even make some of these recipes illustrations available for sale as watercolor prints with written ingredients as in Pansy Salad Rolly Polly...
...Or perhaps, offering these illustrated recipe without the ingredients would be more fun? Maybe folks could write in their own ingredients and measurements in, as in the Wild Morel Mushroom Pizza art print, where there's no text...
...Or it's possible that I could simply release the prints of the final painted dish without the recipes and ingredients to hang as colorful kitchen decor art gifts? A good example of this would be Wild Oregon Grapes Breakfast Parfait Art Print.
Alternatively, I could try to crowd-fund the entire project to make it available to everyone in one fell swoop but I'm already developing a headache just thinking about it. So. No.
This is the first time I'm tackling a project of this size. Will I bring this to fruition? We shall see...
I'm aiming to illustrate…one hundred recipes including all the related pages (gasp.!)
For now, I'm familiar with veggie and so I'm painting mostly vegetarian meals that would be fun to cook or bake.
Folks: Easy-to-make is the word of the day. Anything goes: main meals, side dishes, desserts, beverages, fermented foods, breads, salads, vegetable side dishes, soups and stews - especially savory breakfast items and quick snacks.
These days I work typically on several pencils sketches at once. However, in the beginning, I was drawing and painting them one by one -which makes things take way too long.
For example, I started out with the sketches of Ostrich Fern Pizza (still in progress), then I moved on to this Fermented Pines concoction (above the pencil sketch and below the finished watercolor painting).
Finally I tackled the Garlic Mustard Pesto and Polenta Squares recipe -which is also completed.
Considering that each piece is about 12 x16 or 11 x 15 and takes about 25-30 hours total, I figured out that switching to storyboard mode sketching techniques instead could speed things up quite a bit. Indeed they did.
As of 2025, about 14 pieces have been completed and a handful are already exclusively available in the United Wanderlust art shop.
So if someone is out there who knows opened -source, copyright free, public domain, creative commons sources of delicious recipes that I could tweak to my taste and then illustrate, that would be out of this world!
All I need is to be pointed in the right direction. The recipes don't even need to reference images. Below is the infographic that originally started this years-long, wild foods watercolor recipe illustration saga:
Learn more about this infographic.
___________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
Check out the following pages for details about how to contact me for:
Public Announcement: This blog post was originally published during the holiday season in a Christmas jingle format. It 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.