Another tree

This is something I drew when working on coming up with a tree image (to go along with the others I posted over the last couple of weeks.)

Fresh-baked bread is magic

I'm violating my own rule of posting something for which I didn't create a recipe, but this bread just turned out so darn good that I'm posting it anyway. It's my fourth loaf, and this one was the best. I think I had it just at the right temperature this time. Woohoo!

The recipe is for the rosemary focaccia bread from the fantastic book The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes: Amazing Cookies, Cakes, Muffins, Pies, Brownies and Breads by Kris Holechek. I highly recommend it.

Pre-baking:


Post-baking:

Bao!

I love dim sum, and I especially love bao (yummy yummy buns). I tried making them for the first time using a recipe from my mom's book, Dim Sum: The Art of Chinese Tea Lunch. Mine didn't turn out as pretty as hers did, but they were very tasty!

Instead of a meaty filling, I used a mixture of soy curls, tofu, Chinese eggplant, scallions, ginger, and garlic, plus the same sauce combination in the original recipe for the char siu (barbecued pork) bao filling. I would definitely make this filling again. I had so much left over that I was able to make about fifty won ton with it as well.

I also made my mom's lotus seed paste recipe and made a few dessert buns as well as the savory ones. Yum!

Tip: If you're making sweet buns and you want to put a little red dot on top like they do in the Chinese bakeries, you can just cut a small piece off of a fresh beet and use that. The color is beautiful and stays red.

Cooking

These are some preliminary illustrations for a personal project I'm working on. I drew them in pencil and then redrew them digitally in Painter.

Snowman (and a funny MNSFW followup)

Monday started out beautiful and clear. I almost took my bike out to take a trip to the grocery store, but before I got around to it, several inches of snow had fallen. Over the course of the afternoon, we received more snow than I've seen on any single day so far this winter.

Of course, this meant that I needed to make a snowman. I didn't get to it until night was falling, so I wasn't able to get a great shot - you can't really see his arms, but they're there. He has a carrot nose but no eyes, since I didn't have coal and couldn't find any appropriate subsitutes in the dark. (Note his snowcat companion.)


The next morning, I looked out our bedroom window and noticed that our next door neighbors had made one also! Our two creations are only separated by a few feet and a low fence.


This morning, I decided to go outside and perhaps take a better photo of my snowman in the daylight. I opened the back door to see how he was doing, only to discover that he'd shifted into an inappropriate position all on his own. I had to remove his "nose" so as not to offend the neighbor snowman (or the little girls who built it).

Holding a squash

Here's another drawing of someone holding some kind of plant. I'm not quite sure why I've been drawing these, but maybe it has something to do with recently reading Edible and The Fruit Hunters.

Fun with Painter X

Painter is such an amazing program. I finally started doing some online training for it, and this is just something I made while playing around with it.

Holding a pear

Tree silhouette

Building a snowman

Adrift

This week's Illustration Friday word is "adrift." I decided to play around with transparency and quickly put together the first image that came to mind.

Tissue portrait

This was made in class using black tissue paper, beige tissue paper, and matte medium.

L is for Love

Last card! It's astonishingly hard to come up with enough L words that can be drawn with simple and identifiable shapes.

Tree

This is an unused image from something I'm working on.

Cute cheery creature

Happy Valentine's Day!

Streetcar rider 2

Here's another sketch of a streetcar rider for my painting.

Streetcar rider

Here's another idea for a streetcar rider.

Streetcar riders 2

Here's another sketch of some ideas I had for the streetcar passengers.

Streetcar riders

I was trying to figure out what to paint the other night, and I asked Sean for some kind of prompt or assignment. He said to paint the streetcar during rush hour, in whatever world/reality I wanted to.

Here's a little sketch of how two of the passengers might look.

Another face drawn with pen

Profile in pen

I always draw in pencil lately (except for the charcoal I've been using in class), so I thought it would be a good exercise to just put pen to paper and sketch without using any pencil lines first.

S is for Sorry: "non-icky" edition

As my mom astutely pointed out, many people might not want to give others cards that have spiders and snakes on them. Here's a second edition for the squeamish - the two original images have been replaced with salmon and soft-serve ice cream (vegan, of course!).

Gesture sketches

We had a tall, thin model in class this week, who was really interesting to draw. Here are a few of my 1-minute warmup gesture sketches.

Charcoal drawing from class

I drew this last week in my drawing class. It's just a portion of the drawing, which was on an 18"x24" page. It got a little smudgy when I was transporting it back home.

I covered the page with vine charcoal and smeared it all with a cloth until it was an even mid-tone gray. Then I drew on top of that and picked up charcoal with an eraser to create lights and darks. It was fun!

S is for Sorry

Skating monster

Tiger

Cupcake with swirly frosting