Ideation

As soon as the topic was decided I found myself thinking hard about what I could do in relation to „Food+Memories“, and what would/could I say about it, even though the project could be as deep or shallow as I wanted I knew I wanted to take on the challenge to make it more personal, with this in mind I started a small mind map about the significance of food on my life and memories related to it.

Through this, I ended with two good concepts, „food as a means of survival and an act of solitary meditation“ or „food as an excuse to share a moment or space“, which, is the one I ultimately decided to go for.

Thoughts and Rumination

In order to choose the final concept behind the illustration I started to meditate and write about my relationship to food on the aforementioned ideas, making very rough sketches as I went, ultimately arriving at the memory which informs the whole illustration.

I Thoughts about how when growing up I used to be alone (and therefore ate alone) a big percentage of the time since my parents were very young and driven so they worked more than full-time jobs, and about how that makes me generally unattached to stuff and food in particular. About how we only really shared food on weekends when we would go out to restaurants or fast food. Then I thought about how that changed over time, especially in my early 20s after I met my best friend/partner in life, and how she used to make fun of me because as she said „I was raised by wolves“; I ate at weird times, had 0 etiquette and didn't like anything green. 

Food was never important by itself and so it became more of an excuse to meet people and share some valuable time, independent of what the food was.

This last anecdote is where the final concept of the illustration stems.

Moodboard/Reference board

Next up was creating a loose moodboard/reference board which objective was, more than locking into a specific thing, to inspire me into different paths I could take.

Sketching

Initial sketches of the final concept included only animals in the representation of people, ideally, I would have loved to have dozens of animals but as part of the challenge was to create this illustration in a week that was not a plausible idea.

Initially, it was going to be a metaphorical representation of the anecdote in question using animals, me as a raccoon with the wolves that raised me behind me as a ghostly scene and then me, again, as a raccoon in the present sharing food with other animals, in specific a Tiger, a representation of my partner.

However, during discussions, it became evident that it was too layered and the amount of time needed to make it understandable would still be too much, that's why I opted to do a more straightforward illustration of myself sharing time and food with the family I chose (my pack, if you will) opposed to the ghostly wolves that raised me.

Final Spread

Poster