I’ve always loved cooking and I love recipe books. I think it’s because recipe books remind me of my grandma’s house where she would have shelves of them and homemade recipe books are even more special. Recipe books combine 2 things I really love- journals and food so I’m using Sketchbook Saturday to share some of these recipe illustrations that I hope to make into a recipe book one day. 

It’s a surreal moment in adulthood when you start making your own versions of the comfort food your parents made for you growing up. Collard greens are one of those recipes for me. I got a loose recipe from my grandma over the phone while adding my own spin on things and these turned out so good.

For the recipe illustration, I tried to use colors and patterns that nod to the 1930s and 1940s. I also used a script font that’s elegant and a little hard to read which reminds me of my grandma’s handwriting. I drew out the ingredients and tools first using a brush pen and then pulled the hand-drawn illustrations into Adobe Illustrator to vectorize them and layout the card.

After not drawing for a while, I was really surprised with how happy I was over how it came out.