For over thirty years, I’ve illustrated food. When I first began my career, I had only a portfolio of paintings I created while in college. Let’s pretend the watercolor above is for an Italian soup! I was 18 years old when I painted it and copied a photo that I saw in a magazine. Later on, I used my own photographs.
I’ve enjoyed sharing jobs from my career. For this post, my subject is Italian food. And the billboard above happens to be one of the very first jobs I received after I graduated college in 1981.
The painting was fairly large and a lot more work went into before it was cropped off! I did prepare a custom pizza and sadly did not satisfy the art director with enough drips of cheese. Somehow, he found a way to add them. Years later, I illustrated another slice of pizza with cheese dripping and this time I made sure the drips were emphasized.
My job always started with the art director’s layout. Then I took a photograph for my reference (notice how I burned the pizza crust?). Good thing that I saved the spatula from my first pizza job years earlier.
I traced my photo and sent line drawings to the art director. After that, I created a marker sketch that was usually very realistic. I’ve actually made some of my marker renderings into final illustrations.
When I had to illustrate a pizza inside of a stopwatch, I dreaded illustrating the watch. It was far easier to illustrate something organic instead of perfectly round and shiny metal.
I always found comments made by the art director to be interesting.
But I closely followed my reference and relied on an old-fashioned airbrush to achieve perfect gradations.
One of my larger packaging assignments was for the food manufacturer, Ragu. I created approximately 25 labels for their Italian sauces. I share some marker sketches; printed labels and even an original painting taken from a scan of an old slide. I was definitely tired of mushrooms and onions when I finished that painting!
This is taken from a color photocopy.
This was a marker layout.
Below is another assignment for Chef Boyardee. I did not illustrate the ravioli and my paintings needed to be very photorealistic since the photo would be in front of them. My painting images were scanned from color photocopies and not the best representation of my work.
And my last illustration was taken from a series of labels for flavored non-stick sprays. The flavor was olive oil spray, which doesn’t sound very appealing to me.
I have a lot more information about my illustration career on my blog “Illustrating My Life,” which can be found at this link:
http://foodartist.wordpress.com/
© 2014 by Judy Unger, http://www.myjourneysinsight.com and 20 Lines A Day. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Judy Unger with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: art director, Chef Boyardee, digital art, Dr. Martin Dyes, drawing, food art, food artist, food illustration, food label illustrator, food painter, Food paintings, Illustrate, illustration, illustrator, Italian food, Italian sauce, label illustrations, line drawings, Luma Dyes, marinara sauce, marker illustration, Marker Technique, markers, mushrooms, onions, package design, packaging illustrations, packaging illustrator, Painting, pasta bowl, pasta on fork, pasta sauce, photo-realism, photo-realistic, photorealism, photorealistic, Pizza, pizza billboard, pizza slice, portfolio, Prismacolor pencils, Ragu labels, Realism, still life, vegetable medley, watercolor, watercolors
