Want to learn how to paint a recipe? It’s such a fun project and makes a cute card too!
Wow, I can’t believe the majority of the summer is behind us already. I’ve been busy with the What Creativity Looks Like series as well as releasing my new book (eeek!), and so the craft posts haven’t really been happening as of late. That’s not to say I haven’t been drawing and painting . . . those are two of my and my daughter’s favorite things to do. For my birthday, I received a set of these wonderful opaque watercolors that she has had her eye on ever since. 🙂
Anyway, I know it’s a long way out from now, but for some reason in July I always start wondering about Christmas gifts. I start scribbling ideas down in my notebook and well, this was one of them. I’m sure many of you have seen illustrated recipes before; have you ever tried to make one of your own?
I’ll show you a couple of ways that you can paint a recipe below, and one of them only requires that you can paint a couple of squarish shapes. So don’t worry—you don’t have to be an Arteest for this one. 😉
How to Paint a Recipe
You will need:
One recipe (preferably, a short one or one that is easy to condense)
Watercolors + water
Heavy card stock paper (I used an actual card for this.)
Size 0 brush (or at least a very small one so you can write the words)
*Optional: Larger brush + black gel pen
To start, you might want to write out the recipe in pencil on your paper. This is mainly so you can see how you’ll arrange the elements. Alternately, you could sketch out some ideas on an index card. I made the mistake the first time around of not giving myself enough space, so I ran out of room for the recipe!
For this chocolate chip cookie recipe, I used different colors to paint the ingredients and added a few illustrated elements here and there. Yes, the paint blobbed here and there, but I didn’t care as I was just playing and curious about how this would turn out. It does take practice to make sure the paint doesn’t get too light and too dark at odd intervals. If your’s does (like mine obviously did), don’t worry about it. I’m sure your friend will be so impressed you PAINTED a recipe, they won’t even notice. 🙂
Make little blue dots for blueberries, tiny brown triangles for chocolate chips, etc. Think of ways to simply communicate the elements in your recipe. It’s fun, too, to paint a tiny representation of the finished food item. You can lightly draw your illustrations with pencil and erase them after the paint is dry, or just paint freestyle. Know that if you draw with pencil, sometimes the pencil doesn’t completely come off, but I think that adds to the charm.
As I mentioned above, I painted the cookie recipe on a card, so now I have a unique card to send in the mail. How fun is that?
If you’d rather make a simpler version, you can paint squarish blobs onto your paper, let them completely dry, and then use a gel pen to add the recipe.
By the way, you could make a recipe card like this, color copy it, and attach it to the ingredients for a really nice gift. Doesn’t that sound like a Christmasy thing or what? Okay, I’ll stop with the Christmas stuff. I’m sure it’s just a phase, since by the time Christmas comes around, I’ll be thinking, “Oh no! It’s already here?!” just like the rest of the world. haha
Well, thanks for stopping by today. Let me know if you’ve ever done a project like this in the comments. I hope you have a wonderful {and creative} day!
