Distant Skies at Endgame in Oakland, CA
Posted on February 6th, 2012
Distant Skies, art by Amy Crook at Endgame in Oakland, CA
Did you miss the tentacles? Never fear, new art is here! Well, here at Endgame in Oakland, anyway. I decided to theme the show with skies, stars and moons, and so you can see there’s pieces ranging from last week’s Blue Moon to some of my earliest salt pieces like Aglow. It’s funny, it feels like I’ve been working on the salt technique for ages, but really it’s not quite been a year, so this is a good sampling of the things I’ve done over the past year.
As before, the art is upstairs in the open gaming area, and I’m there most Wednesday evenings playing boardgames with the guys, so feel free to stop in. Of course the room up there is open most of the time, so if you just want to take a peek when I’m not around to stare to you, feel free.
The salt paintings are just so much cooler in person, I want you all to see them, I admit it. There’s even one token non-salt watercolor, Mountains of Madness, just for variety. You can click the image above to get a better view of the 13 pieces included in the show.
Categories: Daily Art, Flowers, Trees and Landscapes, Words Words Words
Tags: endgame, moon, show, stars
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Tentanet
Posted on February 4th, 2012
Tentanet sketch by Amy Crook
Another Saturday, another tentacle monster sketch! This time it’s tentacles over the internet, a subject of which I am obviously quite fond.
Categories: Angels, Cthulhu, and Other Myths, Daily Art, Series and Books
Tags: coloring book, pen and ink, sketch
Sunset Bees
Posted on February 3rd, 2012
Sunset Bees by Amy Crook
Somehow, when I don’t know what to paint, bees keep coming to mind! I suppose they do figure in two things I love quite a bit, Winnie-the-Pooh and Sherlock Holmes. Who can forget “In Which We are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin”? And Holmes’ desire to retire to Sussex and keep bees is equally famous, though in the modern day I keep wanting to see him take up urban beekeeping instead and have box-hives on the roof.
This painting was a bit of an experiment with using watercolor ground to prime over the gesso on the canvas, and then using watercolors for the painting. The color tended to sink into the grooves and dry pale, which gives the sky a dreamy feeling of a sunset seen obliquely through the branches, and the bees flitting overhead.
Sunset Bees, 2.75″x2.75″ oil paint on canvas with 5″ wooden easel.
Below you can see the painting tucked into a bookshelf with my Pooh and Piglet bank, though in this case it looks a bit like Pooh is protecting Piglet from a horror of bees. Hah.
Sunset Bees with easel, by Amy Crook
Categories: Daily Art, Flowers, Trees and Landscapes, Whimsical and Strange
Tags: bees, for sale, tiny painting, watercolor
Blue Moon
Posted on February 2nd, 2012
Blue Moon by Amy Crook
I chose soft blue pen and ink to pair with a rich, deep blue background, and then added salt in two different ways for texture. The brightest stars are the now-familiar salt pools, and there’s a scattering of dimmer ones formed by salt sprinkled onto the damp watercolor paint and brushed off once it dried. It was still too stark for me, so I went and found my tiny dot-card sample of interference blue and added haloes of half-there light around each salt pool and the moon, too, which you can barely see in the above scan, and better down in the detail shots below.
Blue Moon, 7″x5″ salt, pen & ink, watercolor and iridescent watercolor on paper, nfs (sold).
Blue Moon, detail 1, by Amy Crook
Above you can see three of the salt pools up close and personal, light glinting off their facets and a faint shadow of the interference blue. Below, the shimmer’s caught the light and you can see the brushed haloes around each large object, as well as the little starbursts of texture in the background of the deep blue sky.
Blue Moon, detail 2, by Amy Crook
And of course I took a photo of it framed, once I had it all ready for the show. In the sunlight, the background looks less black, though it’s still velvety-matte against the shimmering, sparkling stars and moon.
Blue Moon, framed watercolor by Amy Crook
Categories: Daily Art, Flowers, Trees and Landscapes, Series and Books
Tags: blue, blue moon, iridescent, moon, nfs, pen and ink, salt, sold, spirals, watercolor
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Snape and Harry Shrinky Dinks
Posted on February 1st, 2012
Snape and Harry Shrinky Dinks by Amy Crook
Yes, that is a dime off in the distance there. Yes, they are just that wee. Somehow, I forget every time just how small they’re going to get! I have no idea what I’ll do with these, possibly a random giveaway. I have jump rings for them (which are ginormous compared to the actual charms) but it’s much easier to photograph them flat without.
Here you can see them before shrinking, next to a pair of scissors for relative scale. Their colors are also less intense, since they get much more pigment-dense when the material they’re on shrinks.
Snape and Harry Shrinky Dinks, before, by Amy Crook
And then a clearer shot of the after, with the same pair of scissors and the additional dime for reference. SO WEE.
Snape and Harry Shrinky Dinks, after, by Amy Crook
Snape and Harry Shrinky Dinks, incredibly wee, Sharpie marker on Shrinky Dink plastic, nfs.
Categories: Daily Art, People, Figures and Faces, Series and Books, Things I'm a Fan Of
Tags: Harry Potter, nfs, shrinky dinks, snape
Tentacle Spiral 2
Posted on January 31st, 2012
Tentacle Spiral 2 by Amy Crook
As predicted, I’ve got a second installment for my Tentacle Spiral series. This started out as something else, but once I looked at the smudgy, swirly green background I just knew it needed tentacles. I mixed up a very dark green that’s a little translucent, so you can see some of the other colors where the tentacles grow thin, as though they’re not quite fully in this world.
Tentacle Spiral 2, 8″x8″ watercolor on Fluid watercolor paper.
Tentacle Spiral 2, detail, by Amy Crook
These tentacle spiral pieces also look very cool when photographed at an angle like this, so much so I even made a wallpaper of this one. It’s been ages since I shared one, so I figured it was about time.
Categories: Angels, Cthulhu, and Other Myths, Daily Art, Free Wallpapers, Series and Books, Tentacles
Tags: for sale, spirals, tentacle spiral, tentacles, watercolor
Abandon All Hope
Posted on January 30th, 2012
Abandon All Hope print by Amy Crook
A perfect message for your Monday, really, this print reads:
ABANDON ALL HOPE
Ye Who Enter Here**If you have already abandoned all
hope, please disregard this notice.
I saw this quote on a LOLcat ages ago, which of course I totally failed to bookmark, and made a digital poster of it. I could never quite bring myself to list it in my Etsy shop, however, and I think that was because it just wasn’t really my style. So, I took watercolor and Sharpie marker and remade it by hand with scribbly Amy-style Sharpie calligraphy, and I liked it so much I’m keeping the original.
Abandon All Hope, 8″x10″ watercolor and Sharpie Marker on paper, not for sale. However, prints are available at my Etsy shop.
Categories: Angels, Cthulhu, and Other Myths, Daily Art, Words Words Words
Tags: calligraphy, lolcat, mine all mine, nfs, print, sharpie marker, watercolor
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