The students begin by finding reference images of the food they wanted to create. Using that as the point of departure, they went on to understand the recipe and ingredients of how it was made. What is the story that you are trying to say through a single image?
For each food-type different ingredients and methods were identified. The answers to all the questions above, were just as diverse as the makers and their stories.
• Choose what you want to create?
The students who attempted this particular workshop chose to create Sushi, Spaghetti, Cookies and a Pizza. Let's see how it was made.
You can source references from the net, keep them on phone, on the laptop, close to your workstation while making the final artwork.
It also helps to build a small reference or mood board in a diary where you have images, it helps to look at them now and again while making the 'food’.
• Understand why are you choosing it? What is its form like? How does it look physically?
Why do you choose something? because you like it, or it bothers you. Or it fascinates you? Or you want to get a chance to know it better? Is it easy to make? Are objects available that can be reused to create your food artwork? From all the food that is being created in this tutorial by students, none of it is Indian food. Why is that so? The physical appearance of Indian food is a little tricky to replicate. And global cuisines usually cook their food in a way that the identity of the food and its form is mostly preserved. Which make it easier to identify and recreate, and also draw.
Can you spot what is real and what is fake from the ingredients from above? See how the qualities are mapped against qualities, it is real texture vs created texture, and natural colours vs created colours.
While some artworks had a story embedded within themselves, others were more form oriented in nature. Let's see how something's were visualised by the students.
According to the artist - This slice of pizza represents everything that we are made up of. Metal nuts represent the mechanical nature of man and all things manmade. The cheese is made from pages of books, representing the endless source of information we are exposed to, over a lifetime. Red and yellow peppers are made with wires. And bindi’s have been used as pepperoni to represent India. The artist has so much to say, and all of it become the content that she converted into an artwork.
The story for this student has shaped her content which in turn became an artwork. Her mornings begin with newspapers, coffee and cookies. Newspapers are filled with a lot of data and information. Cookies, she connected it to HTTP cookies, it’s a small piece carrying a lot of data, hence the cookies she made were of news’paper’ mache. So this is how the cookie crumbles for her.
Is it pipes, is it a straw … noooo … its Macroni! Wait! Hang on … its pieces of straws. This image is a clear example of how the form has taken over the content. The material is so apt for creating something that looks specifically like macaroni that the form has given shape to the artwork, resulting in a story.
Similarly, black paper and thermocal ‘puffy’ rice forms an authentic looking Sushi, making it a great example of a ‘form over content’ driven artwork.
• How will you recreate it with different materials?
Instead of boiling, sautéing, baking and garnishing, the students took to tearing, folding, cutting, mixing, sticking, rolling, pasting, painting and arranging the ingredients to make their dish.
This student is shaping up the foam, to make it look deceptively like a piece of bun bread.
Dipping woollen spaghetti into creamy green paint sauce.
Painting a slice of foam.
• Are you being able to understand the limitations that lie within the subject? And are you learning how to choose those elements which are graphically interpretable ?
We step into a phase where we understand the shortcomings and the strengths of each material. Paper can never remain permanently wet, and liquid cannot be cut. Paper can be turned into a dough, but can never be like clay. Clay cannot be semitransparent but liquid can be totally opaque. Wool resembles the noodles and crepe paper has a leafy texture, thermocal balls look like puffed up, shiny rice and beads look like tutti-frutti.
However their always remain challenges while taking on anything new, but the idea is to keep trying. So the thermocal balls ‘rice’ was extremely difficult to keep still as it would keep flying away. However, plenty of fevicol squeezed into the Sushi was good enough to create the stickiness of the rice filling. The ‘Woollen’ spaghetti kept absorbing too much of the ‘thick paint’ gravy and kept fading into a very light green until sufficient colour was added to it. The cookie mache took very long to be made from a paper pulp, but finally the cookies were so real that they could be lifted off the plate to be eaten.
