Today we had our first class in Food Styling. It was brilliant! I attended a food styling master class before in Dublin with Dublin/London-based food stylist Johan van der Merwe. It gave me some fascinating insights into the industry and made me want to learn more about it, so lo and behold, I’m now taking a Masters with Food Styling classes. For our first class, our tutor Maxime arrived with a bag of sandwich ingredients and we were given free rein to create a sandwich.
Ready steady…style!
Once our sandwiches were styled, we had a critique of each sandwich’s merits and faults, these were some points for my feedback.
The bread was quite rustic and therefore difficult to cut clean slices from, for which Maxime had a solution–a stanley knife. In food styling there are so many little tricks to get around these kinds of problems.
Painting brown shoe polish on the edges of the turkey slices to add a bit more colour and definition.
I strategically didn’t add any weird inedible things like shoe polish or glue (or safety pins for that matter) to my sandwich so that I could then eat it for my lunch without worrying about eating shoe polish! It’s very often the case, as far as I know, that the food that is photographed on a shoot is not edible afterwards. Possibly less so now than in previous decades, as there is a return to more natural food. Apparently before, the food that was photographed in shoots was largely fake food, not real food at all!
