Delicious Design

My career as a professional artist outside of the classroom often becomes the fodder that fuels my desire to continually create new experiences for my students. The beginning of the 2021 school year was no exception. My Advanced Computer Graphics students were just the participants to gracefully endure my inability to control my teacher geekiness.

During quarantine, one of the arts councils I belong to invited artists to submit artworks that celebrate one of their favorite recipes for a publication called Draw and Dine. I must tell you, requesting one of my personal recipes is a dangerous proposition—my mother waited twenty years to get my homemade mac and cheese recipe! The thought of creating food art was appealing, but submitting the corresponding recipe with the artwork gave me pause. In the end, art won and I submitted three pieces that were all accepted.

A year later, when I was organizing my home studio and came across the Draw and Dine recipe book, that aha moment happened. This concept would make a superb project for my Advanced Computer Graphics students. It would challenge them to work with new subject matter and invite them to explore new digital illustration and painting techniques. I could also introduce them to the tenets of graphic design through the production of book pages using page layout software. The cherry on top would be discussing the dos and don’ts of typography.

The challenge with this first project of the year was transitioning students from introductory program fundamentals and the safety of my step-by-step tutorials to a more customized and sophisticated level of art-making. Left to their own devices, students usually find it overwhelming to suddenly have total freedom to pick their own subject matter, style, and programs. Students who don’t fully give over to the process often create artwork that is a hot mess, or they don’t complete the work in a timely fashion.

Journaling was the perfect solution to address these issues. However, many of my digital arts students were reluctant to participate in this activity because they tend to avoid traditional art classes where this is encouraged. They often claim they can’t draw or it’s too hard. To ease them in, I engineered a digital work packet to introduce them to the importance of planning and research. The fear subsides because they are journaling without possibly recognizing what they are doing. I offered the work packet via our online classroom management system so they could work on it anywhere anytime. For their first time, I offered them a week of class time to work on it.

The work packet is an abridged version of the design process. Students defined the design problem by telling me if they would like to create an appetizer, entrée, dessert, or beverage. Students then researched ten examples of the food item they wished to focus on in a variety of media and compositions, and they shared their findings with me.

As part of the research phase, students hyperlinked the location of the recipe they would use for the typographic portion of the project. Students brainstormed their approach by locating a Photoshop and/or Illustrator tutorial online that best fit with how they envisioned illustrating their recipe. Then they located and researched an artist who specializes in food illustration in relation to the style they wished to achieve for their own work.
Lastly, students created a blueprint outlining the details for their artwork by considering questions such as:

Why were you drawn to the artist you selected?
What key elements and features of your artist’s work do you plan to emulate?
What programs will you use to make your artwork?
Based on past projects, what challenges do you expect to face and how do you intend to resolve them?
Based on past projects, what was your biggest improvement or accomplishment and how do you plan to build on that success?

I gave students plenty of resources to help them complete the work packet since this was all very new to them. I provided an outline of the design process, words for art and sentence starters, a slideshow presentation on the elements of art and principles of design, and an example of a completed packet.

This approach was excellent because I could leave comments and links to additional resources specific to each student directly in the work packet. It was a clumsy process for them at first, like learning to walk, and I found leaving comments and additional resources helped them immensely. Students revised their work packets and resubmitted them after taking my comments into consideration. I counted the work packet as a project grade, so students understood that the preparation phase was just as important as the creation of the artwork.

Students’ efforts during the planning stage were evident in the completed layouts. It’s always a nail-biter rolling out a new project, especially at the beginning of the year. Thereʼs now talk of assembling their works into a mini-recipe book to sell to help raise funds for our school’s Art Honor Society. That would be the icing on the cake.

Exploring digital illustration through food.

Delicious Epiphany

Challenges

Offering a Work Packet

Further Research

Sharing Resources