This year has been a really busy year for me. I was preparing to publish my third cookbook and I’m going to start a 7 week for illustration class with a famous Taiwanese illustration website “創作私庫 School of Creative“. For this course I will be recording a series of videos and people will enrol onto the class and I will give feedback and educate, really interesting and really cool.
I always love adding a little bit of a “personal touch” to anything I do and this includes my cookbooks. So I illustrated these cute kitchenware illustrations as well as some different Chinese spice illustrations. I want my cookbook to not only be full of delicious Chinese food and recipes but also some cute and cheerful illustrations for my readers.
I’ve always been a fan of cute and pretty dining ware, kitchenware and all of these kinds of things. Not only do I work as an illustrator, I also work as a food writer and a huge part of this is the styling aspect so I’m always collecting different kinds of props for my photoshoots. So I think it’s normal that I just adore them. I’ve always wanted to illustrate and design my own dining ware and this is the perfect opportunity for me to practice.
For the design idea, I illustrated a lot of flowers, vegetables and fruit on this series of kitchenware illustrations and this is because I love drawing things that are related to food or have a botanical and theme. But of course I can illustrate anything not just this two things. I also kept the colour theme light, bright and simple so it will make the viewer feel happy and cheerful when they view my illustrations.
So back to my first teaching experience in illustration, some of you might feel quite curious about this, I got this teaching opportunity because last year I published my first illustrated cookbook “The Illustrative Chef-30 illustrated recipes by Liv Wan” with a famous food illustration website “They Drawn and Cook“. After that I got a lot more food illustration related commissions and I was interviewed by a well known Taiwanese illustration magazine and I was also interviewed by a popular Taiwanese illustration website “插畫生活 Illustration Today“. So the founder of the “School of Creative 創作私庫”, Anais Lee, kindly invited me to be one of the illustration tutors for their food illustration class. She told me a lot of her students actually asked how to illustrate food like me? So this is how I got this teaching opportunity!
So far I have loved every minute of teaching and teaching is something I’ve always enjoyed. I had to record a number of video tutorials for the class, basically guiding my students from drawing sketches to publishing recipes on “They Draw and Cook” so I bought a wee microphone and away I went. It’s quite funny for me at least because I live in quite a noisy household (remember I have a 4.5 year old daughter) and our neighbours can be quite noisy so a lot of the lessons were recorded very late at night. But it was been a fairly easy process for me because the classes have been in my native language (Chinese in case you’re guessing) so I don’t have to worry about my grammar 🙂
My students have come from all kinds of backgrounds, some of them are new to illustrating, some are illustration students while other are freelance illustrations. But they all loved my food illustrations enough to sign up for the class which is great. Every week we will have a small assignment or digital food drawing practice and after they have completed and submitted their assignments to the website we use for class i will give them critiques and feedbacks. Also if they have any kind of questions I’m always there to answer and help them.
At the end of the 7 week class, every student who followed the guidance and class progress will produce at least 1 food recipe illustration that they can upload to the food illustration website “They Draw and Cook” and also use for their portfolio to attract potential clients! I will introduce you more about my illustration class after the class is nearly finish. At this moment I hope I can keep rest of the class information as a surprise for my students. 😉 Stay tuned!
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