Celebrity Chefs

Celebrity chefs have always grinded my gears in a strange way, I appreciate their food but often find the showmanship of them annoying and distracted, they act like they are coming up with things off the top of their head, and when judging competitions, tend to exaggerate the drama for entertainment, but to me its always felt a bit silly, so what if my cake isn’t a perfect circle, it still tastes quite nice. Another thing that peeves me about celebrity chefs is that they always over sell their food, I get it, it look nice, but it is just fried chicken with chips no need to start moaning in pleasure over it..

 

If I’m honest I don’t have much actual venom towards chefs but I just think its something that isn’t talked about enough, it’s just accepted that sexually moaning over food and throwing lamb at the floor because its overdone is normal in the world of cooking media. I do find them entertaining but in a kind of surreal way, If an alien saw Masterchef what do you think they’d make of it? would they understand we are eating food or would a grown human moaning while slurping up another dead organism (plant or animal) seem horrifying. These people are not hated by me, but they have put themselves in a position where they are so easy to make fun of, and how can I resist this opportunity to have a giggle at their expense.

 

To me, Greg Wallis has always looked a bit like a thumb, and Marcus Wareing has always looked like a ventriloquist dummy

This was a very quick drawing of many celebrity chefs, I also realized the potential that Gordon Ramsay had as he is has managed to concentrate the essence of everything I find funny about celebrity chefs. These drawings were very rough and fast but I was really playing with different ways of drawing facial features, I really liked drawing the noses as with a 2D face this is a good way to create depth and get a good likeness.

Gordan Ramsay is an atomic bomb of expression, he is so intense and he errupts into rants which contain some of the most over the top insults I have ever witnessed, I really liked writing down a lot of these insults as they all kind of fit together. I was considering making a haiku or a poem out of them.

I drew one of my classmates Pete very quickly to practice drawing caricatures, I think I managed to achieve a weirdly good likeness on the left drawing.

Around this time I found this excellent animation by Zeeeko, this animation is exactly what I commenting on and although this animation was perfect for what it is, I wanted to produce a card using what his quotes like a poem as previously talked about

I wrote down a lot of his best insults from hours of research and assembled to create the poetry masterpiece below

Fuck Face,

I can’t bear to look at you,

Id rather flee the fucking country

Did that hurt?

Fucking sue me

I wanted to create the drawing of Mr Ramsay but before starting I wanted to work on developing my caricature drawing in a digital context, so I turned to Instagram posing a question to my followers, Who should I draw? these drawings would be very quick (around 5-10 minutes each) and done without colouring. below are my results…

I was having a bit of fun here as Grimes and Elon Musk are together so I fused them, I’m not sure why but it felt like the right thing to do…

 

 

This was one of my friends Tom, I don’t have a picture to put in this blog but I thought I would put this in as it helped me develop my skills.

 

Then the suggestions started getting more and more abstract, but I kept going…

 

I decided to stop here as I kept getting intentionally dumb suggestions like “Spongebob on weed the ganja boxer” I thought doing these would show people that it’s not very interesting but it actually caused an influx of 12 year olds suggesting strange combinations of things. One dumb suggestion caught my attention tho and I couldn’t resist appeasing the way of the universe which is “don’t ask dumbass questions if you don’t want dumbass answers” and that was “my dad who left to get cigarettes but never came home”

 

Back To The Task At Hand

 

With everything I had learned from my rapid-fire caricature work, I began to draw Gordan Ramsey.

I always start my digital drawings with a brightly colored sketch layer, this is how I lay down the lines without worrying too much about how clean my linework is, or if the details are right, its simply to achieve a likeness, and good composition, often I will draw 3 or 4 of these layers on top of each other as I tweak areas or make big changes, with portraits however once I have the likeness, I rarely have to chance small areas. This sketch was good, expressive and fun, but not recognizable enough because Gordons face is scrunched up it’s very hard to capture the likeness without using tone. I thought his most recognizable feature is his big wrinkly forehead so tried to emphasize that, but ultimately I decided to start again with a new reference.

I managed to capture the likeness of Gordon Ramsay and his forehead, it was still very rough but I liked the direction it was moving so wanted to clean up some of the bumpy lines, so using this as a guide, I drew a much more careful version over the top, this while drawing the new version I paid close attention to pressure variation, ensuring that lines vary in thickness where they should, as well as intersecting lines to make sure they were relatively clean, I also used my reference more to add a lot of the wrinkles as with the version above, I just drew marks, where I thought it looked like marks, were needed based on aesthetics.

This is the final version of this card, and although I really like it, I wanted to keep my momentum going and draw my initial target, Greg from Masterchef…

When drawing a caricature I try to pick out a distinct feature that I can play on for humor and likeness, For this drawing it was a combination of his spherical head, iconic glasses and strange bumpy smile. I used the reference below for this drawing.

 

I found this a lot easier than the Gordon Ramsay one as Greg has much easier faciel proportions to get right, he is very smooth and his eyes+glasses almost immediately created a likeness.

The shading on this portrait was really important, I wanted to make him look extra supple by using highlights, I tried to use as few lines as possible for creases in the skin and opted for tonal differences to help achieve a round supple head. Over the previous summer, I had worked on a supple hairless drawing of one of my former housemates and that influenced my portrait a lot.

I had made fun of the relentless food anger of Gordon Ramsay, but this was to comment on the oddly sexual food comments that many foods shows broadcast, so for this quote, I picked one of Gregs finest moments while talking about dessert where he states “That has flicked every one of my switches”. These two portraits are really nice but they don’t have enough venom, I have a more humourous relationship with the two personalities and I wanted to focus on someone who I really didn’t like.

So drew a few conservative politicians

In June of the summer I returned to this theme in a strange way, drawing my mum a Dominic Cummings themed birthday card, this was not an intentional part of the project but it looking back it was probably heavily influenced by the project.

 

references:

 

After drawing the politicians I realised that there was a chef that I did have venom towards, one that I have heard a lot of nasty things about both through the media and from people who had met the man, this was none other than pastry womaniser Paul Hollywood, he had an affair with a much younger woman and often acts quite creepy on the great British bakeoff, I wanted to draw him in a way that made him especially creepy and I found a quote where he said

“My first job at the bakery was jamming doughnuts.”

it was already an innuendo and if I emphasized the sexual side of this quote I thought I could make something both funny and uncomfortable. I started my visual experimentation with some slightly abstract drawings of paul, trying to capture a likeness without working in a realistic way.

After reading statements from people claiming Paul was inappropriately flirting with contestants on the show, watching his mannerisms that often felt quite threatening despite being reactions to cake, and reading statements from his ex-wife and the woman who he had an affair with I started to develop a more perverted image of Paul Holywood in my mind, I knew that this was fuel and that the more uncomfortable I felt, the more expressive the drawing would be, so I started to draw.

Initially I drew this as I wanted to establish a style, I liked my previous work on chefs but wanted to work in a few of the styles I had worked on when sketching, this was evident in the nose mainly. I drew this to act as a blue print as far as what the lines should mean as lines can mean tone, form or texture, I would focus on line being marking out the form, I would then use shading to establish tonal variation.

I drew his face out based on the reference at the start, and it quickly became very disturbing, I knew I wanted to make him look creepy and the best way I felt I could do this was with his faciel expression, I had him bite his lip and roll his eyes which immediately made him 40x more creepy, I then decided to make him topless, I did not realize this would make it look like he is performing a sex act until it was too late, but I wanted to roll with is, after all my last illustrations didn’t push the envelope enough and that was the purpose of this piece.

I redrew the face carefully making sure to focus on line thickness as I knew this would be important for establishing a form. I started to think maybe it wouldn’t be as horrifically creepy as my initial sketch looked

I completed the initial linework and decided to remove his bread tattoo as that felt a little out of place, I had a great likeness, and it was very creepy but I wasn’t sure if it said “creepy doughnut man” enough, so as i coloured the drawing I added a donut themed background.

I honestly don’t think I have ever drawn anything so cursed or horrible in my life, I took a long hot shower after birthing this into the world, but I do think it’s pretty good. The shading made it feel much more real and this made it a lot harder to look at. I was successful at creating a venomous caricature that is making fun of someone, but I certainly didn’t feel like a winner.