Sign up for my VIP list to receive early purchase access to my first four new cake paintings and prints this Thursday, November 12.
My new cake paintings series will be coming out this week, and I’m so excited. While this only signals the release of my first four cake paintings (with a giant 24″ x 24″ Strawberry Shortcake Cake currently in the works as the fifth cake), it’s kind of monumental for me. I’ve been painting ice creams almost exclusively for so many years. Last year, I started to shake things up with my new Cookie and Gingerbread paintings. This year, I wanted to add cakes to my repertoire. Now, I feel like I have the experience and skills to tackle all of the dessert-related paintings I see in my imagination. What you see here is just the tip of the sugary iceberg.
Learning to Paint Cakes
I’m an acrylic realism painter, but that doesn’t mean that painting all things is equal. Each subject requires a slightly different approach. That might mean deciding if I need to do a colored or monochromatic underpainting. That might mean deciding the types of brushes I use or the way I use them. Additionally, in the case of cake paintings, it means I’ve had to learn to bake cakes!
With the exception of the “Cheesecake with Cherries” piece (which I bought and then added the cherries to it), I baked the other cakes to use as reference models first. I always work from my own subjects, whether it’s my ice cream cones, my cookie or gingerbread pieces, or now cakes. Some pieces are more complex than others. For example, I did actually bake seven small distinct colored cakes for my “Rainbow Cake” painting (shown above), stack them together with more than a pound of buttercream frosting, carefully slice the edges so it looked like a single slice, then photograph it before the tall rainbow goodness fell to its imminent demise. It was beautiful while it lasted! Now, it will stay beautiful as a meticulously painted artwork.
Why go through all that trouble? In part, as I’ve said before, I want to really “know” my subjects. It gives my paintings a much more personal vision and voice. There’s no better way to “know” a baked good than to bake it. Every curve, every drip, every detail — I made them all in real-life first so I could make a painting that is far beyond a technical exercise.
The trickiest thing has been learning to replicated the illusion of cake texture. I’ve done this by continuing to use many layers of acrylic, overlapping my marks and using old rough brushes to build out an appearance of dimension. Overall, I am quite sure that I am one of the most detailed cake painters out there, trying to get the works to be as accurate and full of crumbly goodness. Ultimately, just like my other dessert paintings, I want these cake paintings to be magical — at least as magical as I can make them with some tiny soft brushes and limited palette of acrylic paint.
Click here to see some of my favorite Instagram behind-the-scenes baking and painting videos for the new cake series.
Where I’m Headed
I want it to be clear that the cake paintings are an addition to my existing dessert paintings, so I’ll still be painting realistic ice cream paintings and magical trompe l’oeil cookie and gingerbread paintings. What the cakes do, however, is open doors. I can paint cake variations and combinations, celebrations and desserts full of imagination. I can pair the cakes with ice cream. In fact, I’m already beginning to develop a new 24″ x 24″ strawberry ice cream cone to pair alongside my in-progress giant strawberry cake, as well as a new matching gingerbread house piece, which I’m planning to paint in December.
I think the larger question for people who may have followed my work in the past is, why are you changing? My answer is, I’m not. This is an expansion of all of the wonderfully imaginative dessert paintings I’ve already been doing. Now, I can take this a step further.
I’m not just painting still life replicas of desserts. If it was that, I’d just license some stock imagery or pick up whatever was available at the grocery store and paint it. That doesn’t interest me. No, I’m creating a world. It’s a world filled with magical dessert imagery that harken back to childhood and the joys of simple moments and grand celebrations. There are so many paintings in my head, I’ll simply never have time to paint them all. But the world needs a bit of magic, so I’m going to do the best I can. The cake paintings are the next step of my evolution as a dessert painter. I hope you’ll stick around to see what’s in store.
Sign up for my VIP list for early-purchase access to my first four cake paintings on my website, beginning this Thursday November 12 at 11 a.m. EST.
Tune in to my live Twitch streams to see me continue painting my giant Strawberry Cake, as well as many of the other upcoming projects I’ve mentioned here.
For more information about my Cookie and Gingerbread Paintings, check out these posts:
- Three Videos of My Paintings that Recently Went Viral on TikTok
- Three Reasons I Wish You Could See My New Paintings in Person and Not Online
- Exploring the Details of the Trompe L’Oeil Painting “The Daydreamer”
- Painting “Beautiful Day in the Gingerbread Neighborhood” Part 1
- Designing “Beautiful Day in the Gingerbread Neighborhood” Part 2
- Process for “Beautiful Day in the Gingerbread Neighborhood” Part 3
- Painting “Sing”, My Whimsical Songbird Cookie Trompe L’Oeil Painting
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