Dessert Illustrations

I need to write on this blog more, lots of changes have happened. Not doing Japanese food anymore as the price of ingredients is too much and doesn't give me enough freedom to experiment. Instead I'm doing to fairy tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon' as while I was reading a lot of different fairy tales from different cultures I found the structure of this fairy tale is used very often. I looked into the Aarne-Thompson Classification System for fairy tales and found this is one of the fairy tales with the most versions in different cultures: Norwegian, Mexican, Spanish, Romanian, Italian, Scottish and Greek.

So I did some sketches and went through the story and decided that since I like working with environments and the journey seems particularly important I'm going to focus on all the places the Heroine goes to in the course of the tale using the foods of each of the cultures that use the same motif. Spent ages finding a variety of recipes to know what I had to work with shape and texture wise.

So I've got a basic idea of the composition, some weak points that could be worked on. Was originally going to make the whole piece in one go but in order to test how the piece would look I photoshopped some photos of the foods from the web together and realised this would be a more realistic way to make my final piece. Considering its going to take ages to make whats come to about 13 recipes and some might go off plus not even sure I have the storage for all of this. Should probably start with the most complicated first so I can allow for screw ups.

Also need to think about photography, want to be able to photograph at home because the chances of me getting the food safely to uni is unlikely, can't put too hot lighting on it so will probably need to use as much natural light as possible. Photographing in daytime, baking at night?

And also the final piece, I'm liking the idea of a book that folds out into a poster, saw a book in the library's collection recently that had a concertina fold stuck to a box - stick a roll to a thin box so the piece could be rolled out? I would have liked to do a stand alone print (like a poster) but I don't think the piece can work on its own without the text. So need to look into the paper to print onto and how to incorporate the story.

More importantly I need to come up with a time plan...