INTRODUCTION | Let's turn your next feast drawing from simple to lively!

Turn your feast from a simple meal to a festive feast!

 

A warm feast with lots of food always makes the occasion more festive! Today, I'll be showing some design principles for building a lively scene!

 

MAIN FOCUS SUBJECT

When drawing a busy scene, first answer the following question:

What am I including and which is my main focus?

 

 

My Focus:

The roast turkey will be my centerpiece and main focus by being the largest piece on the table.

 

Other Elements to add:

Cheese Charcuterie board

Wine/drinks

A large pot of hearty soup

Sauce and toppings

 

TIPS

Make sure to add some variety in the scale of the objects from flat plates full of food to tall wine bottles/glasses and small cutlery.

This can affect balance in the scene, but also create emphasis on your feast's focus!

LINEART

I'm going to be using the chalk pastel pencil brush! This rough texture is really nice to capture the texture in food!

 

 

 

When drawing any food, start with simple shapes! My cheese wheel is just a cylinder and the charcuterie board is a rectangle with a round top.

 

Refind your shapes, and add more dimension to them! I took a slice of cheese out so you can recognize the shape, even without colour!

 

Add more details! To call it a cheese platter, I need more cheese and grapes (for colour)

 

 

 

I'm drawing each part on a separate layer. This will come in handy when you want to change up your composition and add background elements.

LIGHTING & COLOURS

How light interacts with different surfaces:

 

Wood is not reflective, so I'll use my base colors and shadows, but less highlights.

 

 

 

Metal, glass, and ceramic are often highly glossy, and will require hard shadows and hard highlights.

 

 

 

Food can vary! Bread, cheese, and mashed potatoes would not be glossy, while soup, sauces, or anything oily - like the turkey, with have more defined highlights.

For each dish of food, add additional elements to add extra colour, otherwise, everything would be brown.

When it comes to picking colours, make sure they are bright and saturated! On the left, colours are bright and warm. On the right, colours are dull and cold.

 

Dark and desaturated colours don't look very appetizing! Just take a look below and see which feast you'd rather eat.

COMPOSITION

To create depth and make the feast more lively, I've duplicated most of the food and blurred them into the background. Creating depth like this brings more of the focus toward the foreground and the main focus, the turkey!

BALANCING YOUR BACKGROUND

At the start, to create a scene, I sketched out a table where I would put all the food. The table doesn't have to take up the whole illustration, or that would be too much food! I added a simple background to bring in some white space.

This is looking really busy. With a warm wood background, a lot of the detail in the food disappears. There is not enough contrast in this scene.

 

I'm going to add white outines to create more contrast between the foreground and the background. By darkening the background we can separate the elements even more!

FINAL TOUCHES ON THE FEAST

I'm adding steam to indicate warm food! Let's show you a quick way to add steam!

 

First of all, steam only moves up, unless someone is blowing onto it, so I'm going to draw two lines.

The first line is longer, but with a smaller-sized brush. The second line is much wider, but shorter. Make sure your second line covers the entire width of your food, otherwise, it would look like the only part that is hot, is the middle. Add some finishing touches to give the steam some more dimension.

THE FESTIVE FEAST

I hope you enjoyed the tips and make your next feast drawing a little more festive!