Food & Drink Illustrations

Food clipart: why it gets drawn, and how to use it without trouble

Most illustrated food on packaging is not photographed but drawn for fairly ordinary reasons. A drawing gives you the fruit at the ripeness you want, in the light you want, with nothing bruised, and it does not need a shoot, a stylist, or an extra attempt when the strawberries go soft.

The US Department of Agriculture came to the same conclusion a long time ago. Between 1886 and 1942, it kept artists on staff to paint fruit, and the collection runs to more than 7,500 watercolors, of which nearly 3,800 are apples. Growers were producing new varieties faster than anyone could keep track of, and what separated one variety from another was color and surface — which the photography of the period could not capture. So the government hired painters. Deborah Griscom Passmore did several hundred of them and ultimately led the work.

Those plates already look like packaging. One specimen, a cut half beside it, even light, plain background, nothing spoiled. Food illustration has kept that arrangement ever since, whether it is an engraved lemon on a gin label or a flat vector taco in a delivery app, because what a client usually wants is not a meal but the ideal version of an ingredient, sitting on its own so it can be moved anywhere.

Where food clipart is used best

• Menus, boards and delivery listings, where every dish needs the same treatment and a photo shoot is out of the question.
• Packaging for tea, preserves, spirits, sauces and anything with a made-by-hand register.
• Recipe layouts, cookbooks and food editorial.
• Market stalls, food trucks and small hospitality identities.
• Supermarket own-label ranges that need one drawing style across dozens of products.
• Nutrition and health explainers where illustrated ingredients read more clearly than photographs.

Choosing food artwork for the job

Ask what it's being printed on before you decide how the food should look. A lot of food packaging goes flexo onto kraft, corrugated, or film, and that closes up fine hatching and pale washes that would have been fine on a coated sheet. If nobody's told you the substrate yet, start with flat or line vector, which survives most processes, and you can swap something painted in later.

Get the illustration in front of the client's regulatory people early, and do it before you have built a whole pack around it. They decide how literally a picture can describe what is inside, and the answer moves around by market and by product category in ways the brief will not tell you. Leave it, and you find out at repro, with the artwork finished and the print slot booked.

Build the small one while you are still working on the big one. The same dish appears on a full-width header and in a listing thumbnail, and painted or engraved artwork turns into a brown smudge at 20mm. Take the vector, thin the interior details until they survive, and keep both files — you will need them later anyway.

How food clipart is drawn

• Painted. Watercolor produce, drinks, and seasonal sets, scanned from real paint. Warm and irregular, raster only, and limited by the size of the original sheet.
• Flat vector. Fruit and ingredient sets, usually shipping with matching patterns so the same drawing can run as artwork and as a background.
• Sticker style. Food elements drawn with an offset border and a shadow, made for layouts and social.
• Mascots and characters. Food with a face, or a figure attached to a flavor. Built for packaging and signage where a brand needs something to carry.
• Collage and cut-out. Printed food fragments and ephemera assembled by hand, with paper and halftone visible.