Garlic, cookbooks and figures

One evening this week I thought I would draw my garlic keeper and some cloves of garlic. I started out with the clay container that I keep my heads of garlic in. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it until I scanned it into the computer to post. ACK, what was I thinking, it is seriously leaning to the right. Needless to say the container doesn't actually lean, the poor thing is perfectly symmetrical   I know from past drawings that I sometimes have a tendency to do that with objects. I don't seem to have that problem with people but objects that should be symmetrical have a tendency to lean to the right. Course I am right handed so that might be part of the problem. Thought I would post this drawing anyway but understand that in the near future I plan on redrawing this object with hopefully better results.

I had better results when I was just drawing the garlic heads.

At the time I was doing these drawings I had 2 heads of garlic in the keeper, one a whole head that I haven't taken any cloves off of, and another head that is pretty well gone. Above are some pen and ink sketches of the whole head and one sketch of a single clove. No preliminary pencil drawings with this, I just went in with the technical pen and drew. I am semi pleased with the results, at least they look like cloves of garlic. 

Above is another page of thumbnail sketches of possible illustrations for the cookbook. These would be for the section I have on cookies.

For many years for Christmas I made cookies to give away to friends and family. I would usually spend 2 full days baking and would bake at least 8 to 10 different kinds of cookies. Needless to say over the years I collected quite a few cookie recipes so this section of the cookbook is going to be larger than it might usually be and I decided they deserved a section all of their own. It has been quite a few years since I have done that amount of baking, as we have all grown older that quantity of sweets is no longer welcome, but they were yummy.

This past Monday I didn't attend the Long Pose Figure session that I usually attend. Our weather was a bit unsettled (snow, sleet, rain) so I decided to stay home that evening and attend the short pose session Tuesday night instead.

Above are some of my better efforts from that evening. Top 2 images are from 2 minute poses, bottom 2 would have been 5 minute poses and the drawing below is from a 15 minute pose.

Obviously with the short poses you don't have time to draw a lot of details, the main goal is to capture the energy of the model/pose. The top four drawings were done directly with ink, with some added colored pencil on one of the drawings. For the 15 minute poses I switched to pencil, since I would have time to make some corrections and could do some erasures.

 One last image, a photograph I made this afternoon at Houghtons, Pond in Milton MA. Surprisingly there is still some ice on the pond, though we had a couple of extremely warm days (temps actually reached 60 degrees) this past week with a fairly heavy rain. Course it started to turn colder yesterday afternoon and by today the temp was again around the freezing mark with a rather chilly breeze. We had a lot of clouds this afternoon, still the sun was out when I was making this photo lighting up the mid ground trees.

That is it for today, per usual comments are welcome.