It hit me the other day that I have as some sort of service person since I was 17….that 20 years now. I learned how to bartend when I was just a kid - 21 and had no idea what a cocktail was much less how to make and serve one. After years and years of practice, I’ve gained some degree of proficiency in the medium. Much like a drawing or a painting, getting good at making a proper drink takes time, and practice and messing up and messing up and messing up, over and over again. Somewhere in that awkward courtship between the drinkers and the booze, I developed an inexhaustible love for the bars, the drinks, and the people who serve them. I have always kind of wanted to do my own little cocktail book, as sometimes I think I am a better bartender than illustrator….It felt like now is as good a time as any to dip a toe in and see how drawing cocktails feels. Big ups to my friend Neille Mcumber who put a boot in my ass and gave me the idea to do the “Magnificent Seven” of cocktail classics as a little intro project.
Well I can say safely that I absolutely hate painting liquid in glass - I always have…and honestly how boring would it be if all the images were just paintings of glasses and liquid - the genre is rife with them. The above is a little doodle I did on the iPad - trying out how to make cocktails fun to draw. This is by no means a final illustration or anything that will go past some silly penguins playing around in some booze - but it felt good to hack out a spec with a visual. So there you have it. The first of hopefully many in a series of illustrated cocktail recipes.
P.S. The above recipe absolutely works as intended. More detailed info on how to make the cocktail can be found on my instagram page: @chrislaneinks