For my birthday, my sister and I made a brownie chocolate cheesecake—recipe here by Cooking Tree—and I thought I might as well draw it too. So, here is a cake I baked. 

I finished drawing it before I actually saw the finished cake, so I had to anticipate what it would look like. It has a pretty simple appearance, so that wasn’t too hard. My first plan was to draw the whole cake, but since it is entirely covered in ganache, I decided that wouldn’t be too interesting to look at. 

I was feeling inspired by a particular painter named AlaiGanuza on Twitter. She primarily paints still lifes in oil and digital. Her use of color is really impressive to me since she uses such bright colors, yet they feel like they make sense in context. I wasn’t trying to learn from her too seriously, but I did have her work in the back of my mind as I was drawing.

My colors ended up way more subtle than Alai Ganuza’s. I like the idea of saturated colors, but I get nervous when I have to actually try them, and I don’t even realize that they’re not as saturated as I mean for them to be. The whipped cream is the part where I succeeded in my goals the most. It has a wider range of hues than the rest, and I had fun with the shapes. It feels sort of out of place though, which I theorize has something to do with both the colors and the line weight. I was tempted to crop the image down to just the whipped cream and a bit of the surrounding area, but it’s already low resolution, so I decided against it. I ended up upping the saturation a bit with a filter after taking a step back to look at it with fresh eyes. 

I highly recommend the cake itself, it’s very tasty. It has a rich chocolate flavor and it’s not overwhelmingly sweet, which is something I hate in cakes. I also recommend checking out Alai Ganuza’s work, she has an interesting way of making still lives feel more lively.