Illustrations: Cafe Balbina

My main inspiration for these images was a book, The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. By the way, an awesome book, but I won't review it, follow the link if you'd like to read more. The imagery influencing these illustrations was a mash-up of the aesthetics of Edwardian and Inter-war Vienna and Paris. 

The book chronicles the history of the Ephrussi family, their lives which for many of them includes an interest and involvement with the arts. There are many dark times of history described in this book, which I am in no way attempting to address with these rather uncomplicated drawings. My second influence was the Art Deco movement, the ornate patterning, contrasting colours and emphasis on line.

Art Deco imagery from different artists. My source material*

The place where these two influences intersect in my drawings is that both had moments of being overwhelmingly wealthy, and the decadent luxuriousness of these times obviously just needed an illustration of some cake to describe it... Maybe. The problem with working from such beautiful imagery is that your own work looks so lame in comparison, does anyone else who makes artwork get that feeling?

         

Aiming to pick up the style with this experimental drawing. 

                         

               

My sketch of the Vienna Cafe smoking room on SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie (pre-wars)

My aim was to pick up as much Art Deco style as I could, I paraphrased an image by Erté *

I made the illustrations with a basic pen and ink drawing on cartridge paper, then scanned them and added some textures and filters to emphasise the lines and add a minimal amount of perspective. My next plan is to put them on cards, I might lino cut them and print onto the cards that way.

By me, Mille-Feuille. Probably much easier to draw than bake.

                         

Me again, Madeleines.

My final drawing in tis series, I don't even know what cakes these are, but they have Art Deco cake cases.

It's like the cafe name, but with Art Deco rays.

                         

This was fun, the drawings were so careful, like flat childrens' drawings, and here I just spun it around into a swirly ornate mess.

Thank you for reading! Please leave me a comment if you have anything to say about the writing or drawings. 

*All my references are lovely Wikipedia, and the Art Deco source images were from the book Art Deco, The Golden Age Of Art And Illustration by Michael Robinson and Rosalind Ormiston