Welcome to My Food and Travel Illustration Blog

Looking for food and travel illustration with a cultural twist? Or perhaps you love to try authentic and illustrated recipes from Italy, the Mediterranean, and The Middle East & North Africa! Well, you’ve come to the right place!

I’m Yaansoon, an illustrator and artist from the Mediterranean. Having travelled to more than 20 countries across 4 continents – meeting men, women and children from all kinds of cultures along the way – I’ve decided to specialise in cultural food and travel illustration.

Illustrated maps that celebrate a country’s heritage, food culture, and iconic architecture are a true passion of mine. Creating illustrated food depicting authentic recipes from my multi-cultural heritage is another reason why I started this blog.

I’m also passionate about creating women empowerment artwork. This has allowed me to venture into making illustrated portraits (aka, portraiture or people illustration), with motifs and patterns that reflect the diverse cultures of the women depicted in the illustrations.

I’m glad you’ve found your way to my illustration blog. Let me give you a quick tour!

Illustration Commissions & Licencing

Identity is an important part of this blog and my illustration style in general. To learn more about my multi-cultural roots, you can check out the About page, where I explain the different influences and values most present in my work.

My ‘Illustration Portfolio’ is where I post client work and completed commissions, whereas the ‘Illustrated Blog Series’ section is where I express my passion for food and travel through illustration

If you’re a potential client who is interested in commissioning me for an illustration project and want to see my previous work, then the Illustration Portfolio is a great place to start.

In addition to the portfolio, a great page to visit for a better idea about my ideas and illustration style is the Illustrated Blog Series. In here, you will find some tried-and-tested travel tips, authentic Middle Eastern and Italian food recipes, Mediterranean kitchen tools, a culinary tour around Italy, illustrated maps, as well as inspiring stories about resilient women and female figures who have taught me valuable lessons about living compassionately.

Did you know that select illustrations on Yaansoon.com are open for licensing requests from professional agencies in the design & publishing industries?

Some of the illustrations on my website are open for licensing requests from professional agencies and institutions in the publishing/books, editorial, advertising, stationery, packaging, branding, design, tourism, food and hospitality industries. If interested in a particular food and travel illustration, please feel free to drop me a line via the Contact page to check for availability.

Digital & Analogue Illustration: Beyond Food and Travel

With time, I started to realise I sometimes needed to create illustrations that weren’t about food and travel, or that were about cultures other than the ones depicted in this blog. That’s why I started new categories to help me expand on my interests and that’s where I experiment with digital and analogue illustration:

• Analogue Illustration
• Digital Illustration
• Sketchbook

A couple of book publishers have gifted me some wonderful illustrated books that I thought of featuring on my blog. You can find my book reviews, as well as other art, illustration and design inspiration, over at:

• Illustration Inspiration

An Illustration Blog that Continues to Evolve

My illustration style has gone through different stages of maturity. That’s why I see this blog as a place to help develop my illustration personality, ideas, and style.

Many of the illustrations I’ve posted two years ago are no longer representative of who I am today. Slowly but surely, I have been replacing some of these old illustrations with new ones that reflect my illustration style today. Whenever possible, I try to keep the old illustrations at the end of each post for you to see how things have changed and evolved over time.

My logo has also evolved with time. Reflecting my style through handmade branding that reflects my identity as an illustrator and artist is important to me. Above is the latest logo I’ve come up with recently.

And here are the older logo renditions created back in 2016:

In this portfolio video (on YouTube and Vimeo) you can see the logo I had from 2016 up until April 2019. All of the illustrations in the video were created using traditional ink on paper, as well as digital brushes in Adobe Photoshop.

And this video on YouTube chronicles my logo and illustration style back in 2015 and 2016. Some of the vector illustrations here are created using Adobe Illustrator, which I seldom use these days. I’m mostly on Adobe Photoshop for tweaks of analogue artwork, or to create fully digital illustrations.

My Illustration Style

Dabbling with different mediums and materials, I realized that my strongest suit was in linear pen and ink drawing. My number one tool is my ink pen, along with a host of ink brushes that I use to experiment with hand-lettering.

Although I do venture out to create painterly gouache illustrations every once in a while, strong and defined lines using my fine liners is where I find myself. It’s what I’ve been doing ever since a child.

If you’d like to learn more about my analogue tools, here’s a post for you that details some of the ink pen brands I use, as well as the watercolour and gouache paints I have in my drawer.

For my digital tools, you can check out this post to learn about my Wacom tablets, and other software I use to create or tweak my illustrations.

Thanks for stopping by!

Before you go, don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter to keep up to date with the latest posts and art projects. Looking forward to seeing you again soon and have a lovely day!

Post originally posted in 2016. Content and featured artwork were updated on 3 April 2019 | People illustration + Food and travel illustration by illustrator and artist Yaansoon