orange « Antemortem Arts | Fine Art & Custom Paintings

Posts Tagged ‘orange’

Red Orange Yellow

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Red Orange Yellow by Amy Crook, $199

Another experiment with salt and watercolor, this time the salt picked up just a touch of the colour, turning the salt crystals a sort of transparent pale red that manages not to be very pink at all. I stuck to the warm, sunny end of the spectrum, with swooping zen circles of gold, complementary swishes of orange and just little hints of red creeping back in and blending into the orange at the edges.

I’ll frame it in an 8″x10″ frame with a mat, but right now I’m busy with a big website launch for a client (I can’t wait to show you the header painting!), so anything that needs matting is on the back burner — unless it sells, of course!

Red Orange Yellow, 4″x8″ watercolor and salt on paper, $199 framed, with free shipping.

Cold winter sunlight casts the paper in blue, but the warmth of the paint can’t be dampened in this detail photo.You can really see how the salt is tinged with red from this angle, too.

Red Orange Yellow, detail, by Amy Crook

If you think you’d like to brighten up your home or office with this piece but you’ve got questions, or if you’d just like to chat but don’t want to comment, feel free to drop me a line!

Tags: for sale, orange, red, salt, watercolor, yellow
Posted in Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Shop - Abstract and Just Plain Weird | No Comments »

Autumn Breeze

Monday, January 2nd, 2012

Autumn Breeze by Amy Crook, $333

I wanted to revisit the autumnal color palette of Autumn Winds, so I created this piece with different materials. The paper is a thick, soft cream-coloured printing paper, and the little spirals use quinacridone burnt orange paint instead of the less lightfast pen ink, though the pigment doesn’t infuse as well into the salt. Instead of tea there’s all watercolor paints for the rest, breezy spirals gathered around each salt pool like strange seeds tossed on a light fall breeze.

Autumn Breeze, 8″x6″ watercolor and salt on paper, $333, framed, with free shipping.

Below you can see how the salt crystals spread a little into the textured paper without going too far outside their original pool. The actual color of the piece is somewhere in between the two images, more saturated than the scan but less so than the detail photo.

Autumn Breeze, detail, by Amy Crook

Tags: brown, for sale, gold, orange, salt, watercolor
Posted in Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Shop - Abstract and Just Plain Weird | No Comments »

Rhymes With Orange

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Rhymes With Orange by Amy Crook, $222

Another orange piece! Two in one week! It’s madness!

Or, perhaps I did them on the same day? Well, I suppose it could be so.

The salt pools on this one are colored by salt that was used previously to create texture in other watercolor pieces — I chose a range of warm colors from orange to yellow, and then put in the swirls and spirals to match.

Rhymes With Orange, 7″x5″ mixed media on paper, $222, framed, with free shipping.

Rhymes With Orange, detail 1, by Amy Crook

Reusing “dirty” salt is always a risk, because sometimes the paint doesn’t distribute very well in the salt, as on the left, and sometimes it gets so diluted you can’t see it at all, as on the right. But either way, the salt always seems to retain its sparkle.

Rhymes With Orange, detail 2, by Amy Crook

I thought the black frame really brought out the brightness of the orange. I might try it in a warm brown, too, just for variety.

Rhymes With Orange, framed art by Amy Crook

Rhymes With Orange, framed, by Amy Crook, $222

Tags: for sale, orange, salt, watercolor
Posted in Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Shop - Abstract and Just Plain Weird | No Comments »

Orange Paisley

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Orange Paisley by Amy Crook, $169

I was experimenting twice over with this piece, first by using different paints in each set of 7 paisleys (for 21 total), and then by drawing the salt pools out into shapes. Finally the background seemed to need a good, strong orange, giving the whole thing a wacky ’70s feel.

Orange Paisley, 7″x5″ mixed media on paper, $169, framed, with free shipping.

Orange Paisley, detail 1, by Amy Crook

In the above detail, you can see the sparkle of the subtle duochrome paint and the way it interacts with the salt. Below, a simpler gold color that’s densest where the salt, too, gathered as they dried together.

Orange Paisley, detail 2, by Amy Crook

And finally you can see the piece in a simple black frame, letting the pattern really shine through.

Orange Paisley, framed art by Amy Crook, $169

Tags: for sale, orange, paisley, salt, watercolor
Posted in Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Shop - Abstract and Just Plain Weird | No Comments »

Tentacle Deeps 16

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Tentacle Deeps 16 by Amy Crook, $222

It’s Tuesday and that means tentacles! This is painted on a handmade postcard from India, just like Tentacle Deeps 12 & Tentacle Deeps 13.

I actually use the same two colors of paint for the wash on this as yesterday’s art, but the fade is much looser, and there’s no pure pigment, just different mixtures. When I went to put the tentacles on, it struck me that I hadn’t done a horizontal one yet, and so I used the granular lunar black watercolor to paint in these tentacles. The paint settled into the groovs in the paper, emphasizing the texture of the paper and letting the background color glow through the black as though the tentacles are strangely translucent.

Tentacle Deeps 16, ~4″x6″ watercolor on handmade paper, $222, framed, with free shipping.

I can’t resist taking these bottom-up shots whenever I’m photographing these tentacle pieces these days, even though there’s no salt at all on this one.

Tentacle Deeps 16, detail, by Amy Crook

Here we are, a photo of the framed piece with my iPhone providing scale.

Tentacle Deeps 16, framed art by Amy Crook

Tentacle Deeps 16, framed, by Amy Crook, $222

Tags: for sale, orange, red, tentacle deeps, watercolor
Posted in Angels, Cthulhu, and Other Myths, Daily Art, Series and Books, Shop - Angels, Cthulhu, and Other Myths, Tentacles | No Comments »

White Hot

Monday, September 26th, 2011

White Hot by Amy Crook, $323

It’s hard to capture the way this piece fairly glows with colour. There’s just two pigments, a pink and a rich orangey-gold that fades to the cream color of the paper in the center. I added seven salt circles, double-drawing the spirals in an orange-red and the apricot gold, so the centers of the salt circles reflect the pink from the corners, and the outer circles of salt crystals reflect the orange from the center.

White Hot, 5″x5″ mixed media on paper, $323, framed, with free shipping.

White Hot, detail 1, by Amy Crook

The salt crystals add a three-dimensional texture to the image, like planets being drawn into an inverse black hole.

White Hot, detail 2, by Amy Crook

Tags: for sale, orange, pen and ink, salt, watercolor
Posted in Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Shop - Abstract and Just Plain Weird | No Comments »

Tentacle Deeps 15

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Tentacle Deeps 15 by Amy Crook, $666

Days of work went into today’s piece, but I think they’re my favorite tentacles yet. I used the same technique of softening pen-and-ink with water as in Tentacle Deeps 14, but then I went through and grew salt crystals along the body of each tentacle. The cross-hatching used three different pens to create the sense of light and depth, and my friend Eric L suggested that it looks like the tentacles are starting to dissolve where the light is hitting them.

Tentacle Deeps 15, 5″x7″ mixed media on paper, $666, framed, with free shipping.

Here you can see a closer view of the texture and the way I created the effect of light fading to darkness.

Tentacle Deeps 15, detail 1, by Amy Crook

I love how this shows off the variation in the tentacle colors, and the way the salt crystals sparkle even with the dark ink suffusing them.

Tentacle Deeps 15, detail 2, by Amy Crook

I finally had the brilliant idea of putting something in the framed shots so you’d get a sense of scale, so enjoy this shot of the tentacles in their frame, hanging out with my iPhone.