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Published on January 31, 2018 by · This post may contain affiliate links ·

Cake Sketching

Skill level: Newb

After the cake tasting, you most likely have a scribbled half-sketch with some quick notes and ideas written down.

Providing the client with a digital refined cake sketch is crucial to getting sign-off, especially on a new or creatively out-there design.

Learn how to knock out a cake sketch in Photoshop with a Monoprice graphics tablet.

33:01 Minutes of Instruction

What You Will Learn

  • How to refine a cake sketch design in Photoshop
  • Learn how to quickly pull in reference photos and make them look sketched
  • How to sell the benefits of a high-quality sketch to a client

Tutorial Chapters

  1. Getting started on the cake sketch 0:14
  2. Working with Photoshop layers 3:34
  3. Getting image assets 5:19
  4. Coloring the cake tiers 9:16
  5. Sketching buttercream 11:10
  6. Adding the flowers 17:12
  7. Adding gold leaf 20:11
  8. Selling the benefits of a cake sketch 26:05
  9. Getting final approval 30:34

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About Liz Marek

Liz Marek is a professional cake artist and recipe developer who has been teaching baking and cake decorating since 2008. She founded Artisan Cake Company in Portland, Oregon in 2009 and now runs Sugar Geek Show, where she publishes kitchen-tested recipes, food science explanations, and step-by-step tutorials.

Liz is best known for sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes. She won Netflix's Is It Cake? Holiday 2 in 2025 with a hyperrealistic Santa cake, and has competed on and won Food Network cake competitions. Cake Masters Magazine named her one of the top 10 cake artists in 2017. She is the author of Artisan Cake Company's Visual Guide to Cake Decorating and a graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute.

Her focus is on explaining not just how a recipe works but why it works, so bakers can troubleshoot instead of guess. Every recipe on this site is tested before it's published.

Liz teaches full-length cake tutorials, including sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes, at Sugar Geek University.