As a freelance illustrator for hire, I find it exciting to be challenged from time to time. When asked to illustrate photo realistic food, specifically fruit for some juice containers, I jumped at the challenge.  You see, illustrating photo realistic food is a subject matter that some freelance illustrators specialize in, which means the majority of their illustration labors every day are dedicated to illustrating this one particular subject matter. This enables them to become “masters” at their craft, and for me, an exciting challenge to have the opportunity to illustrate at that level.

The majority of the illustration work you will see in this freelance illustrator portfolio will involve illustrating food and beverage items in a photo realistic style. All of this work was created by me in a freelance illustrator capacity and probably 90% of what you will see is from a single project.

Photo realistic food illustrations need to be clean, crisp, and eye-appealing. The food of course, needs to look like it is at its peak of freshness. Often times, the client wants the food to be doing something that is difficult to capture with a camera. In this case, the four food and beverage illustrations needed had to seamlessly wrap completely around its corresponding juice containers with no beginning or ending.

So why would you pay a freelance illustrator for hire when you could just use a camera to take a picture of the food or beverage? First off, that simple photograph is not so simple. It would require a food stylist, photographer, and art director to accomplish what a single freelance illustrator for hire can do. Secondly, not all fruits are ripe and beautiful at the same time. And third, the photo realistic illustrations needed to seamlessly wrap completely around the juice container without any beginning or ending while pouring the juice into a glass at the same time.

The challenge then was to find multiple ways to display the pouring of juice into a glass within a composition of the same fruit and put all those items together in a creative and imaginative, well-balanced, appealing design where the right side of the illustration blends seamlessly into the left side of the same illustration, while painting the illustration in a photo realistic style. Whew!

There are other freelance illustrations within this food and beverage freelance illustrator portfolio that come from other client projects and were just as challenging. I hope you will take the time to view them and enjoy what you see.