Food Through The Eye Of An Illustrator
PUBLISHED BY MINCHO MAGAZINE
Just as there are countless different recipes for a single dish, there are endless possibilities when it comes to food illustration.
Where chefs create masterpieces in the kitchen, illustrators conjure up visual feasts in the studio. The end results for both are entirely dependent on what ingredients are available and the skills of the creator.
Hong Kong based illustrator and graphic designer Furze Chan has a talent for bringing food to life in a heartwarming way. Her hand-drawn artworks have a nostalgic quality to them; taking cues from vintage children’s book illustrations to transport you back to your favourite childhood meal.
Chan is the co-founder of 1984 Publishing, a small press who believe that well-designed books can be ‘carriers of life’. She also has another side hustle making which she hopes will become ‘treasured keepsakes’ to their new owners. There is a soulful sentiment behind everything Chan puts her name to.
Working with several different editorial platforms as well as brands like Vice and Fruiteca, Chan also has a penchant for gif creation. Her work’s comforting quality is only enhance when it starts to move. The pleasingly imperfect snap of a chocolate bar, a cheeky yoghurt lid begging to be licked and the slightly suggestive wiggle of a sausage all add a splash of humour to this relaxed dining experience.
Illustrations by Furze Chan
While illustrator Lucile Prache’s artworks do not tend to move, she injects her work with a similar level of energy through the use of vibrant colour palettes. Prache uses her illustration work as an outlet for her obsession with street food. As a result, her portfolio reads like a brightly coloured menu of treats from around the globe. Delicacies on offer included everything from perfectly rolled Japanese sushi and sophisticated French cheese boards to far less exotic but just as tempting portions of English fish and chips.
In addition to editorial and book illustrations, Prache creates hand-drawn food maps and illustrated recipe prints which feature both raw ingredients and simplified step-by-step visual breakdowns of how a dish was made. Prache’s style of illustration contains an impressive, almost photorealistic level of detail while still being stylised enough to appear more mouth-watering than the real thing. The most appetising thing about her artworks is how perfectly imperfect they are. Generous dollops of berry compote drizzling down the side of a meringue and salty chips haphazardly surrounding a classic British battered sausage are deliberately messy details which make the illustrations look all the more realistic and enticing.
Illustration by Lucile Prache & Vicki Turner
At the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum, Vicki Turner’s illustration work is all about abstraction. Turner is a British illustrator, designer and founding member of Feist Forest, a collective of makers concerned with sustainability in design. Whether she is designing a piece of furniture for the collective or an editorial infographic for a magazine, curiosity is at the heart of everything Turner creates. Stripping visuals back to their most basic forms inspires this same sense of curiosity within the viewer.
With her food-based work especially, reimagining ingredients as the simplest of shapes encourages cooks to view food as building blocks which are there to have fun with. Reading a recipe through Turner’s abstract eye, pasta becomes an assortment of silly squiggles and baguettes resemble crumb-speckled modelling balloons. Turner isn’t offering an intimidating final image of exactly what a final dish should look like but rather a playful pile of puzzle pieces for you to experiment with.
Food illustration at its best should be able to do the same job as smelling a dish in real life. Whether it makes you feel nostalgic, excited, curious or just hungry - it should make you feel something and it should feel good.
In the hands of the right illustrator, food can even be moulded into a storytelling device. Just as different moods demand different meals, different briefs call for different approaches. Furze Chan’s pencil drawings tell a comforting, childhood tale with a cheeky twist; Lucile Prache’s vibrant watercolours put a contemporary twist on a classic tale; and Vicki Turner’s abstract designs invite you on a surreal adventure.
Each of these extremely talented and vastly different artists sees food in a fresh way - and invites you to do the same. There are as many different ways to draw a dish as there are to cook it. View food through the eye of an illustrator and you will gaze upon something truly unique.
This article was originally written for Mincho Magazine, a Spanish illustration and graphic art magazine.