Hello, everyone! For this month's tips, CSP's team gave the "Food Illustration" prop, which excited me a lot because I love illustrating food! Unlike people, there's not really a wrong way of illustrating food. You do it as you see appetizing! Food comes in such shapes and forms, two slices of cake will never look the same! So, no matter your skill, anyone can draw delicious food.

 

In this tutorial, I'll show you how I do it. But I also want to talk about something that usually comes with food: dishes. By this, I mean plates, cups, glasses, containers, and anything that can hold food or drinks. I'm not great with perspective so it always posed a challenge if I wanted to draw dishes that looked somewhat realistic. Thankfully, CSP has some great perspective tools that can make the task very easy!

 

Of course, you can draw food how you prefer, and that includes dishes, but as with every tutorial, I'll show you what works for me, and you later with practice, you can develop your own process. Let's begin the tutorial.

Lineart

I use vector layers for both dishes and food, and I strongly recommend you to use them for dishes because they'll be easily modifiable.

1. Dishes

Do your sketch as you normally do. I don't worry too much about it, it should just show the general idea of the illustration and the elements in it.

Based on my sketch, I'll use the [Perspective Ruler] to create a guide for the vector line art.

For drawing in perspective, you can find any circle you want by drawing a square on the plane and with the dimensions you want the circle to have, using two lines to find it's center and drawing the circle with the [Ellipse] tool starting from center.

With the Perspective ruler on, all the figures will snap to the perspective, just make sure to have [Aspect type] selected on the desired size. Since this was a bottle of water, I wanted it to be a perfect circle and keep it 1:1.

But making a box all the time is tiresome, and you'll rarely get the desired perspective right away, you'll have to modify the ruler slightly and having to erase the box and do it all over again is time consuming. So instead, draw a straight line going through the middle of your object and determine where the center of your circle will be. Since this was a bottle with several circles, I made several marks at the same interval, but normally I just do the top and the bottom of the object.

 

Then draw one line in one of the sides of the object. You can see two in the picture, but you only really need one.

For both the center line and the side line, I used the perspective ruler and the [Pen] tool. Both these lines are in the third perspective, which is independent of the horizon line in the ruler, so it probably won't change when you edit the ruler to make it fit your drawing.

I'll use these guides to draw the circles I want in a vector layer. Remember, this works for every shape on the [Figure] menu.

If they look a little bigger, or more to the side than what you wanted, don't worry! You can reshape it with the [Operation] tool while pressing [Shift+Alt] and the shape will grow bigger but the perspective won't change!

These are the circles I used, you can see how the shape changes slightly the lower they get. With the Perspective ruler tool, I can always rest assured the shapes will be correct.

I used the same system for the bottle cap.

Here it is with the sides and the top. I used the perspective ruler for the sides, but I just eyed the top.

After some editing and details, this is my lineart.

Do you like it? If you do, check at the end of the tutorial. I added the .csp file with everything, the sketch, the perspective ruler, the guides, and the lineart, so that you can practice what you want with it, whether you want to color it, or try doing the lineart, it's yours!

2. Food

I thought hard and long about what food to draw for this tutorial and after a while I decided on a burger, because it has many different elements and you can see the same style on different ingredients. Also, everybody loves a burger. They look delicious!

 

As usual, I drew the sketch. If I think it's not very clear, I'll continue cleaning it until I'm satisfied.

Based on the sketch, I draw the lineart on a vector layer using the [Bezier Curve] tool.

Using the [Correct line] tool, I'll narrow or thicken the line as I wish. If you find that having the vector paths on the same layer is burdening you, you can always cut and paste them on another one, that way you can work on different lines without affecting the ones close to them.

That's it! See? It's much simpler. There's no wrong way to do it, and you can always grab a line and modify it if you don't like it. I'll explain to you how to do dishes that fit in perspective first and then how I do food, because food is simpler. You may want to check my other tutorial on Bezier curves to get a general understanding of how to use them.

Coloring

There are many ways of coloring food. Even I use more than one style for different illustrations. Here, I'll show you how to color food in a more painterly style because I already explained how I paint flat illustrations in my previous tutorial.

1. Food

Let's go backwards for this, let's do the burger first. The process is the same, don't worry.

 

I always find that coloring a layer with all the elements selected makes the rest of the work easier.

Using your lineart layer, select each element and color them with a simple base color. It should be lighter than your final color and of a similar hue, but besides that, it doesn't matter. Put different elements in different layers for more ease on future steps.

I like to turn up my textures layers at this point, that way I can see what I'm doing. I use a paper texture and a watercolor texture, both in Overlay and 40% opacity.

Then, with a textured brush, I lay some values on the color layers. I try to build some subtle varieties and define some materials, like the translucity of the egg in this example.

After that, comes shading. This I do on a different layer, clipped to the one I have the color on, and set to multiply. I like to use a brush with pressure opacity and a watercolor edge. I use a color similar to the one below, so I used a green for shading the lettuce, an orange for the egg, etc. It's at this point that I add other details like on the lettuce or the bacon.

 

The idea is that you have to build the shapes with your shadows to define them. Here's a gif with all the shades and details.

 

We're almost done. After shading comes lighting. On a layer set to Lighten, build your highlights using a brush with pressure opacity. You can do it in a different layer for each color, but I do it in the same layer for all of them. I make everything shiny, even the bread. I guess it's butter bread! I do it because it makes things look so tasty.

I think the black lineart makes it look a little striking, so I went to the vector layer and changed the color. Yet another advantage vector layers offer.

To finish, I edited it using a [Tone Curve] correction layer.

That's it! Doesn't it look appetizing?

2. Dishes

I won't color the water bottle because I want you to do it on your own with the .csp file. Instead, let's color this cup and plate. As I said, the process is the same.

First, color the shapes with simple, light colors. These will be your color layers.

Next, with a textured brush, build the colors you want.

Then you can start shading and defining your shapes.

After you have your shadows, add highlights.

Lastly, add textures and play around with correction layers.

Extra examples and Conclusion

As I said, there are many ways to color food, and which way you choose will alter the way the final illustration will look. This illustration looks like watercolor.

And this one also looks painterly.

But this one is more graphic, like a flat illustration.

And for this one, I took inspiration in City pop, a style that has been calling my interest as of late.

In fact, all four of these illustrations were studies done with the same sketch, but the results are very different depending on the style I wanted to practice.

I hope this tutorial inspired you to do some food illustration. I enjoy doing it a lot, it doesn't matter the illustration, it always looks so beautiful, it makes me feel hungry! If you have any questions, let me know in the comments, I always read them.

 

As promised, here's the .csp file with the water bottle. If you do something with it, please, show it to me! I'd love to see it!

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Enjoy!