Words and Pictures: Illustrated Food Blogs

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We have camera flashes going off in restaurants. Food blogs are full of lush, color-saturated close-ups of food at its most delicious: the drizzle of olive oil glistens atop a gorgeous plate of ripe tomatoes; the charred flecks of the bruléed sugar crust has us practically listening for the crackle as spoon meets custard.

Illustrated food blogs can feel like a relief after the sensory overload of too much food porn.

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They Draw and Cook (illustrations above) takes you on a world tour of illustration. Each day’s post has been submitted by an artist somewhere on the planet, resulting in a smörgåsbord of cuisines and visual styles. This past week alone we saw an exuberant cossack dancing through a Russian artist’s blini recipe, a cartoonish bacon and egg toastie from England, and a spicy chocolate drink rendered like a desert toned fairy tale from an Israeli illustrator. Young artists are represented on the spin-off Kids Draw and Cook.

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Kokblog (illustration at left) brings us the life and recipes of a Swedish designer with a taste for stylishly rustic cooking. It’s all rendered in simple, mostly black-and-white line drawings.

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Plenty of food bloggers document everything they eat with photographs. Riki Takaoka does it with paintings? meals, snacks, sometimes even the contents of his refrigerator. A more time consuming proposition than photography, he has gotten used to eating his hot food when it’s cold (see Riki’s illustrations, below).