Eye appeal is a buy appeal for the food, especially when that food is just a drawing. In this tutorial, I am going to teach you how to create a visual appeal for the food in your drawings. Although the food in this tutorial is mainly drawn in anime style, the tips and tricks provided here can also be applied to any digital art form as well.

 

Before getting into details, first I want to leave some general tips on creating mouth-watering foods.

 

1. GENERAL TIPS

1- Evolutionally, humans are attracted to bright and vibrant colors when it comes to food. This may be due to the perception of freshness and non-contaminated look that the vibrant color gives to us humans. For that reason, to increase the appeal of our food, we need to use higher chroma, meaning more vivid colors than what normal food would look like. This tip is not only applicable to art but also to the food industry where they create more vibrant looking foods. That being said, not all animes share a common color scheme, and their food coloring generally follows the series’ coloring style. So, many of them can prefer lighter colors as well.

2- The second most important thing that increases the visual taste of a food is the shine. The shinier the food is, the more mouth-watering it is. This is actually a tactic used often by food photographers. For food advertisements, photographers usually go for a shinier look and use hairspray on their food to make them shiny and radiant.

 

Now, I will share more specific tips for drawing in anime style, before getting into my food drawing tutorial.

2. ANIME STYLE FOOD DRAWING

Line art: To paint food in anime style, you either typically draw a very thin line art, or no line at all like in realist paintings. But for my images, I will go for the thin line art and then, color them later when I get to coloring. Because even if there is line art on the food, it is not always necessarily black, but rather colored according to the food’s own base color. When it comes to the plates, line art is generally existent.

 

Coloring: Unlike the anime characters that consist of one flat color and simple shading, food coloring generally goes beyond the color scheme of its anime, and has a more realistic tune to it. Nonetheless, there is a variance across different animes. While Heidi has a very simplistic dual color scheme with hard lines, Food Wars has a more realistic style where line art is not visible and the color palette is rich with soft gradual transitions between different colors. In the meantime, Studio Ghibli style stays somewhere in between.

 

3. DRAWING RAMEN

Ramen is a delicious Japanese noodle soup. It is made up of noodles and a variety of other toppings (pork, scallions etc.) served in a broth, flavored with soy sauce or miso paste. I will start my drawing tutorial with this tasty food.

 

First, we need to start with a rough sketch. I drew this in blue to better see the lines I will draw to the second layer. As a rule of thumb, I generally colorcode my layers to distinguish them better which saves me time when I navigate through my layers. But this is just a preference, you can also prefer not coloring them, or coloring them differently. Here, I color it to purple.

3.1. DRAWING CLEAR LINES

After I am done with my sketch and get a better view of the composition of my drawing, I created a new layer, which is for the line art of my bowl. Before doing that, I decreased the opacity of my sketch layer to 35% to distinguish these two layers.

For my bowl, I drew my line art using the ‘Bezier Tool’ to get more clear lines. So, if you are aiming for a flawless line art you can draw your lines using the ‘Bezier Tool’ or any other tools like ellipse from the ‘Figure’ Sub Tools option. Or if you don’t want an artificial look you can always go with your pen tool. For me, I only drew my bowl with the ‘Bezier Tool’. For the food, I drew them all with the pen tool to give that a more natural look. That said, noodles will also be great to be drawn using the Bezier but I just went with the pen tool.

For the line art I created three separate layers; bowl, food, and ramen. This will also help me later in my coloring. Here as you can see I am done with my line art, but I can always go back to make amendments. This is the benefit of using separate layers.

Now, the next step is to lay down the base colors. For this, I generally create a color set next to the drawing so that they can be easily accessible to me. I color the picture with the ‘Fill’ tool, which comes up when you click the “G” letter on your keyboard once. With the fill tool in clip studio, the colors are typically confined to the area bordered by your lines and this doesn’t really require further fine-tuning.

 

For the initial coloring, I only used flat colors to adjust my general color set better. Here, I haven’t colored my broth with the food because I wanted to adjust the settings of my broth color later to my liking. I colored the underneath of the egg to reddish gray. Since the egg floats on the red broth, the reflection coming from the broth will also be reddish.

 

3.2. DRAWING THE SOUP (LIQUIDS)

Now, I got to my broth coloring, and for the beginning I created a round broth layer covering all the food before erasing any part. For the broth color I used red instead of brown for the sake of using vibrant colors. And I turned the layer mode into 'Multiply'.

Later, I made this layer invisible for a while by clicking on the eye icon next to the layer, and I went back to my ‘food color’ layer and picked all the foods that I wanted to appear above the broth with the ‘Auto Select’ tool. I went back to my broth layer, made it visible, and erased all the red parts where staying on top of my foods. Now, the food is completely free of red color except for noodles. Because noodles generally lay underneath the broth, except for some of their parts. To show the noodle parts that float above the broth, again I opened my ‘food color’ layer. I picked the noodles with the ‘Auto Select’ tool and this automatically selects all the noodle inside the ramen. When I switched back to my broth color layer, in order to distinguish the noodle below and above the broth I only erased the parts that I want to stay above the broth like below, and reduced the opacity of my layer to 75%. This gives a sense of depth to the noodle parts I haven’t erased and they appear sinking below.

Later, I duplicated my broth later, and assigned it as my second broth layer but I changed its mode to the Normal mode and the opacity to 100%. This time I made sure all the noodles are above the broth by the same method and I also placed the layer below the previous broth layer. This brought out the colors of the broth.

I wanted to add more nuances to broth with color, because the deeper the noodles are the less visible it is. I created a new broth layer, and with the soft airbrush tool, using the same red color I drew round shapes in random places of the broth and change the layer mode into multiply.

3.3. COLORING THE LINE ART

After we draw our flat colors, now we can start coloring our line art. To do this, we will click on the “Lock Transparent Pixels” above the layers window, and now we can color our line art without worrying about if we drawing outside the line.

After I am done with the base colors of my food, I also added decoration to my plate to make it look nicer. For the plate decoration, I created a brush that I uploaded to Clip Studio Assets.

You can find it in the Assets by typing 'Bowl Pattern' to the search bar.

Feel free to use it for decorations in your paintings. To use it, after downloading it, you will simply drag the brush to pen or brush palette and start using it like a regular brush.

In order to draw my decoration, I created a new layer to make it less error prone, so that I can easily erase the parts in case I overflow it. I draw mine with the pen tool, but you can also draw it with the Bezier tool to create a better shape, just by clicking the tool icon and change the brush tip to the brush I have created.

 

Next, I created 2 new layers dedicated to my highlights and shadow. I color-coded my shadow layer to blue, and highlights to yellow to better distinguish them. You may prefer to add light yellow color for the highlights and switch layer mode to screen, which will save you from the headache to find highlight colors for each object. But to have more control over my color palette, I did not use that method. Instead, I just added lighter colors than my flat colors to show the highlights. For the bowl shadow I create a different shadow layer. Here I will draw my shadows with a light blue color (I placed the color on the left side of picture below) and change layer mode into multiply. I visualized the light source as coming from the right side and draw shadows inside the right side of the bowl, and outside the left side of the bowl.

Now, I will draw the light reflections on my ramen broth. For this, I created a different layer because physically the reflection over the water is stronger than the reflection on the solid foods. Also, the solid dry foods staying on top of the broth is less reflective of light than the ones that are soaked up in the broth. So, I need to have more light over my broth and maybe a little bit on some wet parts of the noodles. Here I changed my new layer mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Add(Glow)’. I used light orangish color for the lights, and I drew light beams around the ramen soup especially around the point where noodles delve into the bowl.

3.4. CREATING HEAT EFFECT FOR FOOD

When I think about mouth-watering foods, the first thing that comes to my mind are the freshly cooked main dishes. For many foods, heat triggers the chemical reaction that will enhance flavor and adds aroma when applied sufficiently. The reaction in our taste buds transmits a signal going to our brain, which will be more intense when the food temperature increases. Therefore, it would be better if we draw food looking hot, as if it has freshly came out of the oven. To accomplish that, we need to add steam. To give steamy look, first we can pick the white color and use the soft brush from the airbrush tool. And we can draw a rough steam and reduce the opacity of the layer to our liking. For me, I chose 45%.

After this, we select the ‘Smudge’ tool from the Blend Tool set. And smudge certain parts of the steam to give it more complex shape as shown below.

Lastly, for the background, I preferred a wooden table underneath. But if you want to go for a more exaggerated anime look, we can draw a background using the gradient tool, which I will do for sundae below.

4. DRAWING SUNDAE

Now, I am going to teach you how to draw an American ice cream dessert; sundae. Again, I started with a rough sketch to get a visual prototype of my drawing.

While drawing my lines, I generally reduce the opacity of the sketch layer to see the lines in mt new layer better.

Next, I laid down my flat colors.

4.1. GLASSES

The cup carrying the sundae is made up of glass, so I reduced the opacity of my glass color layer.

To create the reflections over the glass, I clicked on the ‘create layer mask’ selection after I 'autoselect'ed the inside the glass. This confines my workspace only in this area. I clicked on the ‘Gradient’ tool and created a new gradient tool that transitions from white color to transparency. I dragged this gradient tool from top to bottom.

I added highlights with the white color to various places especially on the glass.

4.2. TIPS ON HOW TO DRAW ICE-CREAM FAST

Later, I started drawing the ice cream. For this I have a time-saving tip. I used the three colors that I have drawn below. First I filled my flat color. Secondly with the soft airbrush and I drew some lines parallel to each other. After, with the ‘Finger tip’ option in the blend tool, I smudged in the same direction. Later, with the dark color, I drew fine lines with the pen tool. Lastly, I smudged them along the same direction.

And the end result looks like this.

4.3. DRAWING A MOIST BROWNIE

For brownie, I colored the inside to darker brown and its outside layer to lighter brown since outside layer is drier than the inside. And I created cracks on the cake with the dark brown color. Later, I use the ‘Droplet’ in the ‘Airbrush’ subtool and drew holes with darker brown inside the brownie.

I drew highlights with the white color, especially along the cracks.

To give it a more moist look inside the cake, with the light brown color I drew 'droplets', using the ‘Airbrush’ tool.

Next, with the ‘Finger Tip’ option in the ‘Blend’ subtool, I blended those colors, and changed the layer mode to Screen.

4.4. CREAMY SURFACES

For the cream on the top of the sundae, I drew hard lines with the gray pen tool, and smudged them later on.

To color my line art, which is optional, I switched back to my line layer and I clicked on the ‘Lock transparent pixels’ option on the layer panel and colored the lines freely.

To make some additional coloring and draw shades on the glass, with pen tool I started coloring the areas where I thought there could be shadows, and later I smudged them with the ‘finger tip’ tool.

4.5. PAINTING WATER DROPLETS FOR COLD FOOD AND BEVERAGE

To give it a colder look I drew water droplets around the glass. This is actually a common physical phenomenon that you can observe in many glasses or tins carrying cold beverages or foods. Briefly, this phenomenon is called condensation, and it occurs when the water vapor transforms into liquid form. When the room temperature encounters the cold surface of the tin or glass, it reaches its dew point and therefore water vapor condenses on the surface and forms water droplets.

To draw the droplets, I first drew white droplet looking shapes over the glass.

After drawing all the droplets, with the ‘Auto Select’ tool, I selected all of them.

I deleted upper left side of it with the soft eraser tool.

I clicked on Select > Invert Selected Area and create a new layer. Here, with the soft airbrush tool and a darker color I drew shadow on the bottom right side.

Again, I clicked on Select > Invert Selected Area, and this time on the same layer and same tool, I drew shadow inside the droplet.

I applied the same technique to all the droplets.

4.6. DRAWING FLUID CHOCOLATE

After I am finished with that, I started drawing the chocolate glaze with the brown color as my base color.

I drew lines inside the chocolate with light brown color.

I duplicated layer, and set the new layer’s mode to ‘Add (Glow)’. I clicked on Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the blur level to 6.

After that, I created a new layer with screen mode. To create shiny look, I drew along the chocolate glaze with the orange color 'soft airbrush' tool.

After that I drew white lines along the glaze.

4.7. DRAWING ABSTRACT ANIME BACKGROUND

Lastly, for the background, if you place the sundae glass on a table, you need to add light reflection on the opposite direction of the light source just next to the bottom of the glass. In the ramen tutorial I said solids are not as reflective as the liquids but of course this does not apply to glasses. Glasses have a higher reflective power and just next to the glass on the table surface, you can always see a light beam. So, if you want to go with a table background, you can add a light reflection to the side with the soft brush tool in a new layer with reduced opacity. But for sundae, I will use a different background.

In anime, sometimes backgrounds can switch into abstract background images. These backgrounds help enhancing the feelings and emotions of the scene. Backgrounds with vivid colors covered with stars and light beams generally denote to emotions of awe, amazement and happiness.

To draw such a background, I created a new gradient tool transitioning from the pink to the yellow color. I dragged this gradient tool from top to bottom.

Later, on a new layer, I used the default ‘Star’, ‘Sparkle’, and ‘Circle’ brushes from the decoration tools on the effect subtool. (Don't forget to draw sparkles on the food as well. No matter the background, stars and sparkles always show a food much more than what it is. To test my argument, try drawing stars on the spinach and see that yourself how even the most boring food can look so magical) I changed the star layer's mode to ‘Add (Glow)’.

I duplicated the layer. I clicked on Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and set the blur to 25.

This is the final product.

This wraps up my tutorial on drawing food. Thank you for reading up to this point!

頂きます! (Itadakimasu)

You can find my other work on Instagram @melisdilisen