Posts Tagged ‘orange’

Autumn Winds

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

Autumn Winds, abstract art by Amy Crook

Autumn Winds by Amy Crook, $299

I’m saving the Weeble this week for Friday, so instead you get a windy Wednesday. This piece uses tea, salt, watercolor, and pen and ink to create a whirlwind of color and shapes that reminded me of leaves tumbling around and around in a little eddy of breeze. I added in the rust-red Japanese maple leaves to add color and strengthen that impression.

Autumn Winds, 7″x5″ mixed media on paper, $299, framed, with free shipping.

Here you can see a close-up of the spot where leaf and salt pool collide; I used my brown pen and very little color leeched out into the salt, making the pools a subtle addition of texture and sparkle rather than a focal color point.

Autumn Winds, detail, by Amy Crook

Autumn Winds, detail, by Amy Crook

This piece looks great in its brown wooden frame, the colors really go well together. It will arrive at your door framed and in upcycled gift wrap, safely packaged for transit.

Autumn Winds, framed art by Amy Crook

Autumn Winds, framed, by Amy Crook, $299

Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Flowers, Trees and Landscapes
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Meteoric

Monday, April 11th, 2011

Meteoric by Amy Crook

Meteoric by Amy Crook

This piece went through several incarnations and changes. My original red wash turned a peachy-orange that I wasn’t expecting when it dried with the salt, and the crater-like formations in the lower left needed something to balance them out. At first I tried adding another layer of salt craters, but that didn’t really help the imbalance, and so I ended up taking first the lighter red and then a dark burgundy pen and drawing in the lines, which tended to blur and spread whenever the pen passed over an area that had been densely soaked in salt water. Then I added one final wash of plain water in the corner, blurring and mixing the reds into a rather surprising fuchsia through which the lines can still be faintly seen.

Though the first incarnation had some accidental overtones with the pink salt spots in the center of soft peach circles, the final has a rather science fiction feel of a meteor shower streaking downward to further ravage the damaged orange surface of the planet below.

Meteoric, 5″x5″ watercolor and pen and ink on watercolor paper, $169 with free shipping.

Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Series and Books
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Burning Planet

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Burning Planet by Amy Crook

Burning Planet by Amy Crook, $169

A circle is such a simple form, and yet I feel like I could find an infinite variation in them. This one, too, looks the surface of a planet to me, or maybe some alien sun, the swirls of almost neon yellow marked by orange and red patterns.

This time I used my Windsor & Newton watercolors rather than the Japanese pigment inks, and it’s really interesting how the different media react differently to the addition of the salt. Rather than drying to a fine powder, each little spot of orange-red on the yellow paint is actually a salt crystal formed with the pigment-rich water as the salt on top dissolved, and then dried. If you look closely you can see the flat, squarish shapes of the salt crystals (click the image to enlarge). It even sparkles in the sunlight.

Burning Planet, 5″x5″ salt and watercolor on watercolor paper.

Here’s a terrible iPhone photo of the painting at an angle, so you can see the sun sparkling off the crystals:

Burning Planet, detail, by Amy Crook

Burning Planet, detail, by Amy Crook

Categories: Abstract and Just Plain Weird, Daily Art, Series and Books
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Tentacle Deeps 5

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Tentacle Deeps 5 by Amy Crook

Tentacle Deeps 5 by Amy Crook

And then there were five! I’m not sure how this morphed into such a big series, but I’ve enjoyed playing with the variations on a theme.

I did this one the same day I inked all the tiny details in my Gorey-esque illustration from Monday’s post, and I used the same tiny, long lines in the background here as in the background of John’s wallpaper. In this piece, the original wash was a very soft red-to-orange fade, so I chose my vivid orange fountain pen to carefully draw in the texture in the background. The pen is nearly the same color as the border of pooled watercolor around the top edge, so it really meshed well with the paint and brought the whole piece together.

I think this might be my favorite of the series so far.

Tentacle Deeps 5, 5″x5″ pen and ink and watercolor on watercolor paper.

Tentacle Deeps 5, framed art by Amy Crook

Tentacle Deeps 5, framed, by Amy Crook

Categories: Angels, Cthulhu, and Other Myths, Daily Art, Series and Books, Tentacles
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