I love sketching food! It adds so much colour and texture to my sketchbook pages and is a great memory of times with friends (without making them feel uncomfortable by drawing them – I prefer to sketch strangers!).

In this article I want to share a few of my recent food and drink sketches.

This first one was from Easter Saturday when I spent the day catching up with friends on the Central Coast. Even though it was a wet day we had a lovely time outside in their back terrace area. This was a relaxed setting for sketching food as we were sitting at the table for hours and there was no hot food – so no time pressures!

I was experimenting with our current Patreon theme of Framing with this one.

The next sketch was more pressured – hot food during lunch with a friend in Eastwood.

It is much harder to sketch food when at a restaurant with a friend so often I simply get the outline loosely drawn, take a photo and then come back and add more details and colour later (ie. when my friend is in the middle of telling me an involved story).

BTW if any of my readers have any suggestions for places to visit in Eastwood I’d love to know! I lived in Eastwood for the first 7 years of my life and it’s changed a lot since then. I should definitely visit this suburb more often 🙂

Other times I take a photo and sketch later (my niece cooked dinner). Thinking about Lesson 2 indoor exercise from my Edges course (Hard and Soft Edges) while doing this.

And sometimes I’m on my own but hungry! So this is an example of a rushed sketch.

As for hot drinks… sketching tea is easier than coffee as the tea remains hot in the pot.

Cast iron teapot with Oolong tea and some Pink Flamingo Inktense (my current favourite colour!)

My strategy for coffees is to draw the surface of the coffee first and then draw the cup around it. This particular sketch was done during the OneWeek100People challenge so was done very quickly so I could get back to drawing people.

Ah! remember when I used to do a coffee sketch every morning? I prefer to be sketching outdoor scenes these days and soaking up some morning sun so it’s rare for me in my everyday life to actually sit in a cafe and order a coffee.

More tea…I really don’t need it! Lots of fun loose strokes in this one.

And just to finish off this article, here are a few of my food sketches from my trip to Wellington NZ back in January. One of the ways I like to relax when I’m travelling is to have a leisurely solo cafe sketching session.

Ah! I think it’s time for a cuppa now 🙂