- Do you eat cereal and drink milk
or do you eat cereal and milk?
As a kid growing up,
you're watching Saturday morning cartoons
and you're like, eating your milk.
(laughing)
I'm a food stylist.
Consider me a makeup artist for food.
I take boring, everyday, average food
and make it look amazing.
On this episode of Food Stylist Versus,
I'm styling a bowl of cereal.
And I'm not gonna use milk or glue.
(soft bop music)
'Sup guys?
Have you subscribed yet?
Make sure to click the bell on YouTube
so you're notified when there's new episodes.
The sooner you do it, the sooner we'll get back to filming.
Okay, thank you.
Let's talk about cereal.
It is probably one of the most
well thought of food advertisements
and that's probably because when we were kids,
Saturday morning, you're sitting in the living room
watching cartoons, eating your cereal and milk
and then there's another advertisement for cereal
while you're watching cartoons, eating cereal.
So it's just this whole thing, you have these great memories
and because of a certain viral internet video
with all kinds of food stylist hacks,
now everybody thinks that
this is what is in every food styled bowl of cereal
which may or may not be true
but I'm gonna take my turn
and show you guys how I food style a bowl of cereal.
Before we get into the food styling part of it,
we're just gonna kinda talk about cereal
because cereal's awesome.
The box is kinda like the best place to find
what we're talking about here.
And I love the shot of the spoon on the box, it's so legit.
Those beautiful sliced almonds, the flakes,
they're extra sparkly,
they're letting you know that they're frosted.
And then the milk, it's almost dripping out of the spoon
but just not quite.
It's just amazing.
It's like, magic seriously.
Cereal is magic.
And then we have Special K with Red Berries.
I love a flake cereal, especially in food styling,
I think of flake cereal as tippy top.
I don't really care what you think about it
but I think it's pretty and that's what we're here for today
and so you definitely can see the evolution of
cereal advertisements, right?
It didn't all start out with cereal in a bowl
and a spoon and milk.
It went from basically, they advertised with an illustration
to then all these characters that were animated
which we know and love
and then it went into the real life stuff
which we have images like this.
Real cereal, real bowl and real milk, essentially.
That's foreshadowing.
So the first thing
in the whole process of food styling cereal,
is that you have to find the perfect flakes.
Not all flakes are the same,
I know that that's so mind blowing, right?
We have a thing called a flat flake.
Say that five times fast.
We don't want a flat flake,
you want something that's got
a little bit more visual interest.
Character, that's the right word.
And we're also looking at the freeze dried strawberries
'cause if we're gonna style Special K with Berries,
we need to make sure our berries are pretty on point.
So this is actually a really good one,
I was half expecting it to all be dust.
This is the most exciting part of the job, I assure you.
Also just a little information,
I've never actually styled a bowl of cereal before.
We're taking this journey together.
But I feel confident about it, I've done my research.
So I was getting a little disappointed
in the way the flakes in the Special K were looking
and so we opened the box of cornflakes
and they look so good.
Like that, look at that flake.
That's a monster.
I'm not trying to be a weirdo and get excited about
flakes of cereal but, you know.
So I've decided to do cornflakes
and make it look kinda like Special K with Berries.
But with not using the Special K flakes.
So we're just like,
vetoing this.
(beeper noise)
So these flakes are beautiful.
They vary in size, some are big, some are small,
but they have great character, no offense to Special K.
They're made by the same company, so,
they don't really care, I'm just a spaz.
You don't have very many of the little bitty flat flakes
but I might keep some of those aside too, just in case.
Crisco, this is the fun part.
So this bowl is pretty darn deep
and why in the world would I fill it up with cereal
when the only part of the bowl
with the cereal that you're gonna see is on the top?
I'm gonna get my offset spatula and smooth it some more
and then obviously we're gonna just kinda clean up
this extra stuff over here.
The Crisco is not only to fill the empty space in the bowl
that we don't need, but also
it's gonna hold all of our flakes of cereal in place.
So as I'm starting to put the pieces of cereal
into the bowl, I'm definitely thinking about
the camera angle that the bowl is going to be visible from.
This piece is kinda flat but it's still pretty big
so this piece can be used to like,
cover some surface area.
It's a good thing it's cold in here,
that way the Crisco doesn't melt.
My assistant mentioned something about,
if there's a goal that I'm trying to achieve
when I'm putting the cereal into the bowl,
when you're looking at an image,
it just looks super haphazard, a little chaotic.
How can you possibly identify, as you're going through this,
what to do?
There's these pieces in the back,
so that's what I'm kinda working on right now.
I've put some pieces in the center,
but then I also want to go back and add my berries in
and then just continue to build around that.
It's important to make sure I mention
that the Crisco is not the final
thing
to be in this bowl along with the cereal
and I wanna make sure I leave room so that
that milk element is going to be visible as well.
These dehydrated strawberries smell so good.
And that's probably why I used to like that cereal so much.
Please tell me what kinda cereal you like.
Presently and when you were a kid, or both or,
if you don't like cereal, I'm sorry
but you can tell me that too, if you like.
I personally love Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
So I have my healthy cereals that I like.
Are there really such a thing as healthy cereals?
That's a valid question.
Comment below and tell me if you think cereal is healthy.
So this is the flake that I think of
when I think of a cornflake.
It's small,
it's oval,
but then there's obviously all these other flakes
that exist that are giant and weird.
I definitely want to incorporate these guys into my bowl.
Right now I'm just taking my paintbrush
and I'm going around the edge of the bowl
and I'm cleaning up some of that Crisco.
Got a flake.
(making drum roll noise)
This is like, the moment of truth.
The moment you've all been waiting for,
I guess you could say.
I kinda thought about doing a side by side comparison
and use real milk in a bowl
but everybody knows what happens
when you put milk in a bowl of cereal.
You eat it, (rim shot noise)
but we really all do know what happens is it gets soggy.
So I teased you with the Elmer's glue
but I'm not gonna use it.
One thing about Elmer's glue is that when it dries,
it creates a skin which we all know
because we all do arts and crafts, right?
And instead, I have
this product which is a hair conditioning product.
It's much more soft,
it does not harden on the top and get a film.
It stays really smooth and it's white.
And basically what I've done
is I've transferred it into a squeeze bottle.
And where there is exposed Crisco,
that is where this product is going to go.
And it does sort of spread a little bit
because it's like a lotion product.
It's a conditioner so I don't have to
really direct it that much,
it's just gonna kinda do it's thing.
But I do have a paintbrush to help guide it if I need to.
They're finished.
Comment below and tell me what you think, I need to know.
But it is very different,
I almost, for a little bit,
when I was putting the cereal in the Crisco,
I thought the Crisco itself looked really good
but this looks better.
It has a little bit of a shininess to it,
it's a little bit more fluid looking.
So just like a lot of things that I food style,
these bowls of cereal definitely have a front and back
so the front, facing the camera, looks like this.
And then the back
looks like this.
I definitely put the pieces of cereal at an angle
and the strawberries too.
And then when filling the empty space for the milk,
I went around the cereal flakes so there's definitely
some contrast between the front and the back.
Now we're gonna go back to our beauty photo set
and I'm gonna show you one other really cool
food styling trick
for this cereal setup.
Hey you guys, we're on our beauty photo set.
Everything looks super great.
So we have some scenery with OJ,
two bowls of cereaL, some fresh berries
because you always have to have fresh berries
with your cereal,
and some hot coffee.
So now,
I'm gonna do a really cool little bit
where we have this magical floating spoon
which is not floating, obviously,
with the cereal in it and kind of milk coming out of it.
So I'm gonna add some of that Crisco and my cereal flakes
and remember, I'm just doing it from the angle
of the camera behind me
so even though it probably looks
super weird from that direction,
it looks awesome from this direction.
This is where those little flakes come in
that I was talking about earlier
because you want the size of the spoon to make sense
with the flakes and you don't want your flakes to be too big
people are gonna get excited
because we brought the tweezers out.
We're gonna try and catch a drip
coming down the front of the spoon.
So I'm gonna put it in
and she's gonna take the picture simultaneously,
it's super awesome.
Well not to toot my own horn you guys,
but this looks really great.
I'm super proud of the way this turned out.
This was my first ever attempt to food style
a bowl of cereal.
No, you can't eat it.
Yes, it's totally fake.
But it looks
super awesome.
It's commercial advertisement worthy
and
it's all part of the job.
Make sure to like, comment and subscribe.
Click the bell on YouTube
so you stay up to date with all the latest episodes.
And let me know what you wanna see me style next time.