Koala Loves Beer

So this is my first 2D entry. I don't generally do 2D cakes but ever since I saw those anamorphic drawings going around (the 2D drawings that look like 3D objects) I have been DYING to try it out in cake. The construction of this cake is super duper simple. 99.9% of my time was spent actually painting.

But first I had to figure out how these anamorphic drawings do their thing. I found a tutorial on how to stretch an image in photoshop and then print it out to use as a template. The original image from threadless is faily pixelated and I wanted as realistic as possible. So rather than going exactly like the t-shirt, I decided to composite some photos. I found a cute koala fairly easily but I could NOT find a glass of beer with the sun shining through it the way I needed it to for the life of me. Me being the perfectionist that I am, I decided to take a photo myself. The problem? No beer glass and no SUN! arg! Off to goodwill I went to find a glass. Easy enough. But recreating the proper light through a glass with a good looking shadow was very challenging. I also didn't have any condensation so I sprayed the glass with a mister bottle to fake it.

I photoshopped my koala and beer glass together, stretched it to fit the anamorphic template and printed it out. I laid my edible image over the the printed image on my window and did a little outline. Old school light table here. So my goal was to imitate the photoshopped image as close as I could for the most realistic details while still keeping in the theme of the original design.

To paint the details I used a little progel food coloring and various amounts of everclear. I also used some white americolor food color for highlights, bakers craft airbrush for the shadow and some white dinkydoodle food color for the reflection. This all took WAY TOO LONG lol.

When I was in graphic design school we had to do several exercises where we inked an image. I thought my experience would translate easily but edible paper and food color are definitely not the same thing.

I cut my image out and laid it on a piece of gumpaste to dry to bulk up the back. I supported it from bending with a skewer stuck into the back of the cake. The cake is just a simple chocolate cake covered in buttercream and satin ice fondant. No carving at all! Feels weird lol.

I took about a MILLION photos and videos trying to capture the effect of the anamorphic drawing. Overall I think it turned out pretty good but I am already thinking about what to do differently next time :)

Thanks for looking!