Creating an RSPCA Assured recipe book

Earlier in 2020, we were contacted by illustration student, Bethan Brook, who wanted to collaborate with us to create illustrations for some of our Eat Less, Eat Better recipes. We thought this was a great idea, and so we said, “OK”. After a few months of hard work and lots of emails back and forth, the finished illustrations were ready. This is Bethan’s creative journey.

Working with RSPCA Assured

As part of our third-year project, we were asked to find an external client to work with. After researching online, I came across RSPCA Assured. I was aware of their products and thought that they would be an excellent match for me.

The RSPCA Assured website contains a lot of recipe ideas containing not just their farm-assured products but also vegetarian suggestions. This is part of their Eat Less, Eat Better campaign which aims to encourage people to reduce their meat intake and to opt for higher welfare options.

After contacting RSPCA Assured and asking if they would be interested, I began creating with my preferred style of fine liner outlines. This project was a challenge for me since I normally work in just black and white but in order to bring the recipes to life and make them look as enticing as possible, I realised I would need to add colour: I decided watercolours would be best.

Starting the design process

After adding colour, removing colour, and adding colour again to my simple black and white line drawings, I decided to move my project to the digital arena. This would make revisions simpler and also meant I could share my work more easily with my clients.

But I didn’t want to waste the hand-drawn work I had done so far, so I scanned these and pitched the idea of using them as a border. The team at RSPCA Assured liked it and so my initial hand-drawn vegetables made it to the final version.

Drawing the fruit and veg

While I wanted to make the pages look full and colourful, I was also mindful of not overloading them. As we say in design, you need to let the eye breathe. After submitting various options, we decided the charcoal brush colours would show the food off the best.

One problem I ran into was drawing the meat in the dishes, while fruit and vegetables look colourful and appetising, meat can be a little trickier. In contrast, garlic was great to draw, there’s just something about its shape and the texture that makes it fun and easy to draw: it’s now one of my favourites.

Designing the right font

I originally created a different font for each recipe, but while this worked for the pages individually it didn’t really gel when I brought them together in booklet form. After reviewing this, I decided on one font which worked well and was most legible and redesigned all the pages to include that one.