Cooking Bible Larousse Gastronomique
The brief given to me form the creative director from Hamlyn publishers, was to create a front cover for Larousse Gastronomique, the world’s classic culinary reference book, is known for its authoritative and comprehensive collection of recipes, which are written and bound together in one of the most revered cookery books that have been published.
I was given a detailed design direction to illustrate the front cover for Larousse Gastronomique. I could only use particular elements and ingredients such as the following, foliage/tendrils from grape & tomato vines, fresh pea shoots & pods courgette flowers or herbs etc to hold all the elements together. Flowers/leaves these gastronomic nature elements were used through the illustration.
A full list of fresh herbs, star anise, fresh chillies, apple & pear, strawberries, lemon, carrots & leaves, mushrooms, hazelnuts, pasta spirals, wine glasses, garlic bulb, knife/fork/spoon, sea bass, crab/lobster oysters/scallops, chicken or duck, rabbit, balloon whisk, ladle, milk/cream jug, prawns/langoustine, whole fish, mackerel, brioche, croissant, jar of jam, tomatoes on the vine, grapes on the vine, corkscrew, squares of chocolate.
I began the Larousse Gastronomique illustration by working on each of the individual elements and ingredients, which I would piece together to create the illustration. I first created a base structure of tendrils. Once the structure was created I started to place the individual stylized ingredients onto the intricate vector frame structure, and slowly built up the density of the ingredients until it filled the whole cover as a pattern, this particular illustration had taken a good quality amount of time, which took into consideration the detail of each illustrative element, and the dense pattern as a whole.
