Foodie Sketches

Foodie sketches make me happy. Here, at last, is justification for needing to go to a bakery, cafe, or adorable restaurant. It's also an excellent reason to order dessert. Clearly, you need to do this for sketching practice.

Beyond the fact that it's a reason to enjoy some yummy treats, sketching food is enormously fun. The colors, shapes and textures of food give you ample opportunity to use line, color, and a a variety of materials.

This sketch was made using a fine point black Sharpie marker and some quick watercolor washes. Notice the white gel pen used to create the glossy shine on the drizzle of chocolate sauce. Works every time to create the illusion of shiny surfaces, that's why I always keep a white pen in my sketch kit.



Sketching your meal at a restaurant is also great if you're eating alone and need something to do. I will warn you that it's usually a conversation starter and you're likely to have a few admirers, unless you're somewhere very crowded with people coming and going too busy to notice what you're doing.

This sketch of a lunch with my daughter at the Olive Garden restaurant ended up being photographed by the staff so they can print it, frame it and hang it up in the restaurant! That's why I hastily put my name and website at the bottom. Happy stuff like that happens when you're sketching in public.

Sketching at a restaurant of course means that you'll need whomever your eating with to be tolerant of your crazy need to sketch your food.  My family is used to it by now. If you go out to eat with fellow sketchers that's  perfect and usually a really fun time!


Of course sometimes you don't want to be bothered with on lookers or even bothered to get out of your jammies or yoga pants and get dressed to actually go to a restaurant.

In which case you can sketch food at home!

Here's a fast scribbly sketch of breakfast right in my own kitchen.

A word about fast, and  fast food sketches. No pun intended ;-D  First, usually I'm hungry! Second, often there's a non-sketcher with me and I don't want to drive them entirely crazy making them wait to eat until I'm done sketching. Third, there are so many complexities to food sketches, cups and plates with ellipses, the shape of spoons and forks etc. that if I slow down I'll get all hung up on getting those drawn "perfectly" and that will take far to long and ruin the spontaneity of the sketch. Occasionally, if I have the time and the main object is something like a tea pot I might sketch in pencil first, but usually I just take a deep breath and dive in using a pen and focusing on the contours of things. 

Sometimes with this approach the placement of things gets messed up. If that happens I just continue on filling the page and creating a montage. Better for a sketch to be pleasingly inaccurate than annoyingly perfect!