Those who follow my work will know I’m working on a self-initiated project to illustrate thirty recipes for the “They Draw and Cook competition”. I’ve already featured a number of recipes in another post but this is my “They Draw and Cook Recipe Illustrations Part 2”.

The first illustrated recipe is for “Apple Vinegar Pickled Lotus Root”. One really warm evening in Edinburgh when I was thinking about recipes to illustrate I was thinking about what kind of food would be great to eat in this warm weather? I immediately thought about some sweet and sour “pickled vegetables”. So I found this pickled lotus root recipe online and twisted it a little bit to suit the ingredients I had in my home. I also tried a different layout for my recipe this time as I really enjoy illustrating pickled vegetables so I created another recipe in a similar but slightly different style called “Honey Pickled Cherry Tomatoes”.

 

 

“Five Fruit Harvest Roast Pork Belly” recipe illustration.

I came up with this recipe from one of my kitchen experiments. I wanted to cook a pork belly dish in cider so I asked my husband to grab a bottle of cider on the way home from work. He’s not really a cider drinker but bought a bottle simply based on the brand (he used to live in Hereford where they brew Bulmers) and came home with a bottle of Bulmers Five Fruit Harvest. Wow, the pork belly cooked with the Five Fruit Harvest Cider was absolutely delicious. I tried another flavour of cider with the same dish but the results were nowhere near as good. So that’s why I name this dish “Five Fruit Harvest Roast Pork Belly”. This is first time I illustrated a roast pork belly with the crackling on it. I’m not going to lie I was a little big worry about the outcome but I think I nailed it. I always find it’s hard to get the colour and the texture right for meat illustrations but have no problem to illustrate cakes, fruit, vegetable…etc. But “meat” to me is always a bit of challenge.

Here are some of the close up illustrations for you to see more details on the illustration.

 

“Eight Treasure Rice Pudding” recipe illustration

Apart from being an illustrator I’m also a food blogger and cookbook author. I made this eight treasure rice pudding for my food blog four years ago, you can find the recipe on the link I attached. This is a dessert commonly cooked for Chinese New Year dinner. During the process of illustrate this recipes I also found out a game called FarmVille, they use similar image reference of eight treasure rice pudding as the eight treasure rice pudding I made for my food blog. I found that quite interesting.

 

Details illustrations for this recipe illustration, I illustrated the main ingredients in vintage candy jars.

I really enjoy working on self-initiated projects like this because I can try many different things. I can illustrate pretty much anything I want and it’s a lot of fun. I can explore what else I can do with illustrations, try out different colour palettes, layouts and designs.out and design.

So stay tuned! I will put more of my illustrated recipes on this blog very soon.