Archive for the ‘Abstract and Just Plain Weird’ Category
Green Salt Pools
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
Green Salt Pools by Amy Crook
This time I used small chips of salt inside tiny, tight spirals of bright green pen, and put a scant drop of water atop each one. I got small, dense pools of dried salt, almost all of which had a central crystal as well as the border of salt that always forms. This pen came out a pale, yellow-green when it was diluted into the salt, and just like the blue and gold earlier this week, the ink dissolved into the solution completely.
The green in the background is dark and bluish, but the rings around each little salt formation are a brighter green, from the dark shadowy forest to the rich green of leaves overhead to the bright new-leaf green of the salt growth.
Green Salt Pools, 7″x5″ salt, pen and ink and watercolor on watercolor paper, $299 framed, with free shipping.
This picture gives you a better feel for the color and texture of the piece:
Green Salt Pools, detail, by Amy Crook
And here you can see it tucked safe in its frame:
Green Salt Pools, framed, by Amy Crook
Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Series and Books
Tags: for sale, green, pen and ink, salt, watercolor
4 Comments »
Blue Salt Pools
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
Blue Salt Pools by Amy Crook
I’ve been experimenting more with these salt pieces,using different inks to make the original drawings, more or less salt or water to make the pools, and different patterns and colors of watercolor along with them (and even one with no watercolor at all). This one uses a watered-down midnight blue to go with the lighter blue salt pools, and you can see one where the ink really permeated the salt and gave it almost an electric blue feel. Overall I really like the way this one came out, with the color gathering the darkest where the paint brushed along the outer edges of the salt crystals.
Blue Salt Pools, 7″x5″ salt and watercolor on watercolor paper, $299 framed, with free shipping.
I always feel like the scans, while technically accurate, don’t really capture the sparkly, dynamic, three-dimensional feel of these pieces. The salt grows onto the paper, crystallizing with the color from the ink to create these textured alien landscapes, and no photo or scan can ever quite convey that.
Blue Salt Pools, detail, by Amy Crook
It will ship tucked safely in its frame, so you don’t have to worry about anything untoward happening to it in transit.
Blue Salt Pools, framed, by Amy Crook
Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Series and Books
Tags: blue, for sale, salt, watercolor
3 Comments »
Golden Pools
Monday, May 30th, 2011
Golden Pools by Amy Crook
When I started this piece, I’m sure I had intentions of doing something else once the water dried and salt spots formed, but the end result was so serene, I decided to keep it as is. It’s so subtle that my scanner did a terrible job with it, actually, so I had to take a photograph instead.
Golden Pools, 5.5″x4.25″ pen, ink and salt on card.
This is what it looked like early on, when the salt had mostly dissolved but the water hadn’t pulled all of the ink out of the paper yet, so you can still see the orangey-gold spirals faintly inside each drop:
Golden Pools, in progress, by Amy Crook
You can see how the one droplet slipped up over the embossed edge of the card, even though I tried to keep it away. The resultant pool of golden salt stayed in the same spot, gently breaking the borders of the piece:
Golden Pools, detail, by Amy Crook
This last photo encompasses the feeling of the piece for me, the depth and detail that’s hiding in the minimalist presentation:
Golden Pools by Amy Crook
Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art
Tags: ink, salt
1 Comment »
Radiation Spill
Friday, May 27th, 2011
Radiation Spill by Amy Crook
I couldn’t resist a punny title for this piece, after everything that went into making it. I was working away on doing the darker pen-and-ink shading in the background of the tea circle with a quill dip-pen and bottle of ink when I smacked the bottle and dumped it onto the drawing, the table, and a bit on myself. Fortunately I salvaged all three — the tablecloth kept it off the carpet, my pyjamas are none the worse for being a bit inky, and the piece, as you can see, took on a different quality afterward.
I put some salt crystals in the ink pool just to see what happened, and then once it was all dry I finished with the parallel lines radiating out from the salt-encrusted portions of the tea circle. Then, I got a metallic gold colored pencil to put in radial lines coming out from the lighter pool of tea, half-erasing them to give a subtle, distressed feel. One of the things I really like about the quill-and-ink section is that the metal nib actually scratches into the paper, so you can still see the texture of the lines even in the big pool of ink.
I think the final effect is of something rising up over hills, the sun half-under a cloud perhaps, or some alien moon somewhere.
Radiation Spill, 5″x7″ mixed media on watercolor paper, $129 with free shipping.
Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art
Tags: colored pencil, for sale, pen and ink, salt, tea
Tender Planet
Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Tender Planet by Amy Crook
This piece of art was created with theoretically edible ingredients, except of course for the paper. Of course, the tea had been sitting in a dish on my shelf for two days when I made this, so I’m not sure I’d want to have drunk it at that point, but it’s the thought that counts.
I let the tea puddle and gather on the page, and once it started to dry, I moved the tea-soaked salt crystals off the pool in the middle and onto the white page around it. I added a tiny drop of extra tea to the each salt crystal to make a series of satellites around the central circle. The tea had managed to change from when it was fresh-brewed, and a sediment settled out in the denser parts giving it a rough look like a shadow on the surface of a moon or planet. The crystals were brushed gently off once the piece was completely dry, to leave this final image that suggested its name to me the moment I saw it completed.
I think this is my favorite so far of the tea experiments, actually, I love the organic feel of it, nature creating art with only a little bit of human intervention. The slightly larger page size gives the image room to float in the middle like a planet sending its child satellites out to explore space, but not too far just yet.
Tender Planet, 7″x7″ tea and salt on Arches cover white paper.
Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art
Tags: for sale, planet, salt, tea
4 Comments »
Eye of the Moon
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Eye of the Moon by Amy Crook
The same day I did the tea washes, I did a few watercolor washes as well, just simple pale circles to do something with later. When I took this one back out the other night, it reminded me of an eye, but also of a pale, cool moon floating in its own gentle glow. The paper around the circle is a bit warped, giving it a touch of subtle halo, which you can just barely see in the image above.
I used the same crosshatch pattern as I did with Blood Moon, only this time I used a deep blue-black rather than the bright red. Instead of adding texture with a contrasting color of ink, I put an abstractly slitted pupil into the center of the white “eye” that gave the whole image an ornate feeling. The high contrast between background and foreground gives this piece much more deliberateness, and this thinner sketchbook paper also held the ink better, with less bleeding.
Eye of the Moon, 7″x5″ watercolor and pen & ink on paper.
I took a progress shot with my iPhone right after I started, so you can see the texture on the wash without the interference of the pattern.
Eye of the Moon, work in progress by Amy Crook
Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art
Tags: blue, crosshatching, eye, for sale, moon, pen and ink, watercolor
Innocent Stars
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
Innocent Stars by Amy Crook
This piece started out as an experiment to see how the three different pens — blue, green and purple — would fare when wetted with the salt-and-water technique I used for Water Lilies 1. As you can see, the blue hardly bled into the salt at all, the purple let out some pink but stayed largely unblurred, and the green dissolved almost completely. I let it sit for a while on my bookshelf while I pondered what to do next, and eventually I decided that the swirling bright spots reminded me a bit of bright stars.
I mixed up a dark purple-blue-black and layered it into the background in messy, childlike strokes. Then I scattered some smaller salt granules over the wet paint and let it form another, softer set of stars as it dried.
Innocent Stars, 7″x5″ salt, watercolor and pen and ink on watercolor paper, $222 framed with free shipping.
The piece is framed and hanging out in my living room at the moment, just waiting to find a new home.
Innocent Stars, framed, by Amy Crook
Below you can see a couple of close-up details of the salt-and-ink “stars.” My camera was having trouble with the colors, though, so the first one is much more accurate than the second.
Innocent Stars, detail, by Amy Crook
Innocent Stars, detail, by Amy Crook
Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Whimsical and Strange
Tags: for sale, framed, night, pen and ink, purple, salt, sky, stars, watercolor
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