How To Find Inspiration As A Food Stylist
Inspiration ≠ Imitation
There’s a fine line between finding inspiration as a food stylist, and accidentally (or purposefully) imitating others. Truthfully, finding inspiration in any creative capacity can be a tricky task. But that inspiration needs to come from somewhere, right?
There’s a fine line between finding inspiration as a food stylist, and accidentally (or purposefully) imitating others. Truthfully, finding inspiration in any creative capacity can be a tricky task. But that inspiration needs to come from somewhere, right?
As food stylists, we often have to guide our clients away from imitating others, or recreating an image. Asking our food styling clients for photographic inspiration can sometimes take a too-definite turn; as creators, it’s important for us to find inspiration, without ever copying someone else.
Over the years, we’ve figured out how to find inspiration for our food styling business without copying, plagiarizing, or repurposing the ideas of others. And today, we want to share a few of our inspiration-finding tips with you!
A food stylist’s guide to finding inspiration for unprecedented work.
Now, we might have spent the introduction of this blog discussing the fact that we never want to copy or plagiarize the work of others. That said, we do still need to find fresh and unique inspiration, so that we can continue to create fresh and unique work. So, we seek inspiration through two main avenues: creators we look up to, and social platforms we love.
FIND INSPIRATION FROM CREATORS WHO AREN’T FOOD STYLISTS
If we were to ask you who your favorite creators are, more than a few names would likely pop up in your mind. When it comes to finding inspiration as a food stylist, it’s important to always have a few content creators to look up to - those whose style or approach might differ from or compliment yours, but whose tips and work always leave you with a fresh perspective or approach.
Now, you’ll notice that we mentioned finding inspiration from creators who aren’t food stylists, and that was intentional.
YOUR WORK AS A FOOD STYLIST SHOULD BE COMPLETELY UNIQUE TO YOUR OWN STYLE, AESTHETIC, TASTE AND AUDIENCE.
It can be easy to muddy the inspiration waters when you follow or look up to a ton of people who do the exact same thing as you (food styling). So, we recommend finding inspiration from other photographers, creators, editors and stylists who have tips and portfolios that’ll inspire you to approach your own food styling work differently.
Here are two food photographers we find super inspiring:
1. Joanie Simon from The Bite Shot on Youtube
Joanie offers instructional food photography videos that are perfect for aspiring stylists. Her videos teach you about composition and light, which are essential to food styling. Learning about things from a photographer’s perspective can really help us as food stylists understand how to best approach a specific job. If you haven’t checked out Joanie’s work and Youtube channel yet, we highly recommend that you do!
2. Broma Bakery
Not only is Broma Bakery’s content completely addictive and full of personality, but founder Sarah Crawford’s recipes are exceptional, too. Broma’s beautiful website was actually the inspiration for our own redesign - we loved how she broke her business up into two audiences: those who sought out excellent recipes, and those who wanted to learn about food photography. Seeing Broma approach both audiences in that way inspired us to approach our own business and audience differently.
Finding inspiration on Instagram, TikTok & Pinterest.
The important thing to keep in mind when seeking inspiration via social media is to look for like-minded creators, rather than like-minded food stylists. Keep your eye out for photographers, content creators, editors and prop or set stylists who can broaden your understanding of lighting, composition and color. Doing so will allow you to find inspiration and create better food styling work that remains completely unique to you.
Instagram (Good)
Instagram is definitely still relevant, but it feels different now that video is being prioritized over still imagery. Instagram is still very curated; images and videos are really filtered, edited and thoughtful. Because of that, we’ll peruse Instagram to inspire ourselves visually, but we rely on TikTok and Youtube for creative education. We’re curious to find out what happens with the platform in the future, but in the meantime, we’re still enjoying engaging with and seeking inspiration from creators via IG.
TikTok (Better)
TikTok is essentially the opposite of Instagram in almost every way. Because audiences are looking for less-edited, more bite-sized content, TikTok can be a great place for you as a food stylist to get some in-depth, behind the scenes education and inspiration from fellow creators. We love using TikTok for the “how” of our inspiration-gathering process!
Pinterest (Best)
In our humble opinions, Pinterest is the sleeper hit of the food styling world. Back when we first launched Culina, we used Pinterest boards to collaborate on upcoming shoots (mood boards, styling ideas) with photographers. We realized pretty early on that Pinterest is not only the best place to seek inspiration as a food stylist because of the fact that it’s a search engine platform, BUT it’s the perfect place to get your content seen and shared - therefore generating a ton of website traffic.
Want to learn about a specific lighting style? Need to understand the basics of photography composition? You can look pretty much anything up on Pinterest and find a treasure trove of blogs, photos and videos that’ll help you build your skills and find inspiration as a food stylist!
Inspiration ≠ Imitation
It’s amazing how much you can broaden your skills and boost your inspiration by stepping outside of the food-styling content bubble, and enjoying work created by like-minded creators and artists. Here’s hoping your food styling ideas never stop flowing.
