Archive for the ‘Words Words Words’ Category
SFEtsy Art Show at STUDIO Gallery
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
SFEtsy Art Show at STUDIO Gallery, May 2-27, 2012
I’m in a gallery show! It’s all very exciting. It opened technically yesterday, but the reception is Saturday, May 12 from 2-6pm, so you should totally come! Yes, you.
Oh, right, you live on the other side of the country. Well, okay, you’re excused, then.
But not you! You’re just going to have to come.
I have four pieces in the show, which is a big group show with over 60 artists from the SFEtsy Street Team. You can see the details here, and hopefully you’ll find the time to stop by and maybe even the money to buy a piece or three. There’s a wide range of prices, media and themes, which I’ll get to see at the reception I mentioned.
Yay, gallery show! In a real, live gallery! I’ll see you all there, right? Right.
Categories: Daily Art, Words Words Words
Tags: gallery, show, studio gallery, yay
HALP PLS: Update!
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
Help Amy’s Laptop Purchase, Please, Lovely Supporters – THANK YOU!
Can Has Progress!
I promise, Dear Readers and Lovely Supporters alike, not all the Words posts will be about my laptop! But, you’ve all been so helpful this past week I thought you needed an update.
- Between donations and Etsy sales, I’ve added approx. another 10% to my laptop pool. The above bar is a completely unscientific rendering of how much I’ve got saved up, because of course I have only an inkling of how much New Laptop will cost since they haven’t announced them yet. Basically, I figure you all filled in one of those equals signs, so, THANK YOU.
- Tentacle & Snape/Harry shrinky dinks are claimed, but the Tentacle Hand Towel is there to fill the gap. Also, Sherlock/John and the Zombie Head and Cthulhu (with bell!) shrinky dinks are still available to kind donators.
- New stuff on Etsy! Mostly Sherlock, but that’s what’s selling right now.
You are still Most Encouraged to Donate, if you can, or buy something. Especially art! Really, even $1 helps, especially since my life keeps running on and requiring money to do so in the meantime — though this fund is fully earmarked for the laptop, it’s hard to keep saving outside of that. Oh, rent, why do you come every month? Heh.
And now, your regularly scheduled Adorable Donate Button:
Categories: Daily Art, Words Words Words
Tags: donate
HALP PLS
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
Help Amy’s Laptop Purchase, Please, Lovely Supporters!
My Poor Sad Laptop
Dying laptop is dying. My current work computer is about 5.5 years old, and has had several parts replaced. New keyboard, new battery, new hard drive. And yet, it regularly has kernel panics, hangs while starting up or shutting down, and generally wants very much to be retired. I use this computer every day to do all those little things like bring you art and work for my clients and pay my bills. At this point it’s a race between me having the money to replace it, and the death rattle turning into actual forever death.
I would very much like to win this race.
Rumor has it Apple will be putting out a new line of Macbook Pros this spring sometime, and I’ll be trying to get my grabby little hands on one as soon as physically possible.
The one I have still runs Photoshop so you can see your daily art, Dear Readers, but every time it’s a little more reluctant. I’ve done all the maintenance I can (oh god, so much maintenance), but the time has come.
I have about 2/3 of the probable cost saved up (based on what they cost now), so I’m not asking for you to cover the whole thing, just to help close the gap between what I have and the computer that will last me for the next 5 years of 16-hour days and Photoshop abuse.
Thus, we have the HALP PLS fund!
What, you might ask, can you do to help? Well, Lovely and Charming Supporter, there’s a few options:
- Donate using the button above! Anyone who donates $25 or more will get a Shrinky Dink of their very own as a thank-you gift from a grateful artist. Or a hand-drawn dish towel! $40 gets you one of the pairs. But, honestly, even $1 will be a big help.
- Buy something! Peruse my Etsy shop there, and my Art shop here, and see if something suits your fancy. If you want something out of your budget, email me — we can talk about a payment plan or some other way to get the art you love into your home.
- Be a Cartoon or commission an original of your very own! Of course you can email me to talk about either of these, and the only way to commission something is to talk to me first.
An Assortment of Fine Shrinky Dinks Available for Supporter Rewards
Note: If I run low on Shrinky Dinks, I’ll just make more. I have sheets of the stuff, but I have to draw each one individually with Sharpie (or colored pencil, but you know I’m a Sharpie girl at heart), so I’m slow at filling the sheets.
Categories: Daily Art, Words Words Words
Tags: donate
4 Comments »
Recipe: Pirate Cocktail
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
When @skaldheim on Twitter suggested I draw a cocktail for Sharpie Week, I decided to double it up with Words Wednesday and give you a cocktail recipe. I’m all multitasking and efficient and stuff.
- 1.5 oz golden rum such as Pyrat Pistol, 10 Cane, or Mount Gay Eclipse. No Bacardi. Never Bacardi.
- 0.5 oz sweet vermouth
- dash of Angostura bitters
- cherry (optional)
Measure and serve in a highball over ice. Yarr!
Categories: Daily Art, People, Figures and Faces, Words Words Words
Tags: nfs, pirate, recipe, rum, sharpie, sketch
Recipe: Cheesy Meatloaf
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
That’s right, words on Wednesdays means sometimes you will get random recipes again! I know you’re thrilled.
I would describe this meatloaf as delicious but also relentlessly savory — there is nothing sweet about this bad boy, but mmmm it’s good. The nice thing about meatloaf is it’s super easy.
- 20 oz package of ground turkey
- about the same amount of ground beef
- Salt (to taste)
- Pepper (to taste)
- dried Oregano/Basil/Coriander (to taste)
- 1.5 cups Italian breadcrumbs (not Panko, the boring kind in the cardboard can)
- 1 lb shredded cheese (I really like Kraft’s Triple Cheddar)
- 2 eggs
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Spray the inside of a loaf pan with cooking spray.
Mix together all the ingredients in a big bowl. Use your bare hands, or wear gloves to keep them clean. Be gentle, if you overmix you’ll end up with tough meatloaf, but you do want the ingredients all evenly distributed, too.
Bake until the center is at 155°F — I use one of those awesome probe thermometers that goes off when it hits temp, but if you don’t have such a thing, it takes about an hour usually. Cover with foil and sit out to rest for 10-15 minutes. Slice and nom.
Put the leftovers in the fridge as is, and in the morning you can just pull off all that fat that’s in the pool of liquid around the loaf, and then save the gelled gravy beneath for extra tasty noms later. Also, meatloaf sammiches. I’m just sayin’.
Categories: Daily Art, Words Words Words
Tags: cheese, recipe, sharpie
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012
Badlands, now (left) and then (right)
Fugitive dyes, migrating materials, slow-moving chemical reactions — sometimes art changes over time. What’s a girl to do?
Well, I just try to sit back and enjoy it, honestly. When the salt formations in Badlands (above) began to fade from pale pink to white, I did move it out of the sun (oops), and now I’ve been thinking of ways to sneak some pink back in. Which is hilarious, because I remember being all baffled by what to do with the pink salt in the first place, since pink is so not my color. How far we’ve come!
I will try to warn a buyer if I think a piece will change over time, so they don’t get disappointed, but sometimes it comes as a surprise. If you remember my series of hibsicus tea paintings, it’s been very illuminating to pull them out of their storage drawer and find that the color-changing reactions have continued to (very slowly) continue to change colors as time goes on. You can see how the tea has faded to a more subtle color in the whorls of Hibiscus Green below.
Hibiscus Green, now (left) and then (right)
Mixing materials in wacky experiments also sometimes has long-term results. While the copper paint from these two little pots seems to have stayed where it was put, the salt in Midnight Rain (below) has meandered out to the edges of the iridescence and created a different — but to my mind no less appealing — set of shapes and colors.
Midnight Rain, now (left) and then (right)
All of these changes are really subtle, as you can see from the photos (not to mention the inherent dangers in color correcting with Photoshop). In a way, I see it as the art continuing merrily on its way without me, and giving me extra bonus results that I never expected.
What do you think, how would you feel if a piece of art you bought changed itself to something else, right before your eyes?
Categories: Daily Art, Words Words Words
Tags: changes, hibiscus, info, salt
Use Me, Baby
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
Question: Can you use my art for this thing you want to do?
Answer: Maybe!
Growth by Amy Crook
Useful, huh? Well, maybe not.
Let me elaborate.
First off, everything I make is under copyright. Everything any artist makes is under copyright, unless they’ve specifically stated it’s not, or they’ve been dead long enough for it to expire.
That said, I’ve put most art on this site under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. This sounds complicated, but it’s not, I swear. Basically this means you can use my art if:
Tentacle Deeps 6 by Amy Crook
- You’re not making money off your use of it,
- You don’t change it,
- You credit me, and
- You link back to my site (either the specific post or the site in general) in the place you use it.
If you skip one of these steps, then you’re stealing my art, and that’s not very nice.
When can’t you use my art?
- If the post is tagged “all rights reserved” or it’s marked as a commission (often I’ve done both), it’s not available for re-use at all, period.
- If you want to put the image on or in a product such as an eBook, album cover, t-shirt or umbrella, you need to contact me about paying for a rights-restricted license. Basically, if you expect to make money off of it, then you need to pay me to use it.
- If you want to change the art, such as slapping text on it for a blog header, using it as a background for your own art, or shifting the colors to match your post theme, that’s not okay.
Don’t make me send this guy after you.
If you make money with your blog (either as marketing for your business or by getting advertisers), blog headers count as commercial use, anyway.
If you’re not sure, just email me! I’m totally open to helping you out here.
Okay, so when can you use my art?
If you want to use it as a blog post image, go ahead, as long as you credit and link back.
Summer Reading
by Amy Crook
If you want to use it as a wallpaper for your computer (or print 1000 of them and wallpaper your apartment), have at. There’s even a category for posts that have free wallpapers in them. Some are cropped for iPhone, some are just huge-sized for the biggest monitor you might happen to have.
There’s probably a ton of stuff I haven’t covered here, but the basic idea is, if you want to put some tentacles on a blog post you’re probably okay. If you want to put some tentacles on your own line of handmade back-scratchers, that’s probably not okay, but email me and we’ll talk.
You can also ask questions here, if there’s something I haven’t covered. Someone else is probably wondering the same thing, after all.
Sherlock Bookmark 4 by Amy Crook
Categories: Daily Art, Words Words Words
Tags: creative commons, info, licensing, use my art
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