Mood Ring, abstract watercolor painting by Amy Crook, $323

More experiments with the awesome black paper this week. This paper is actually colored by a chemical reaction in the paper pulp when they manufacture it, so the velvety black color is completely lightfast. Possibly more so than the paint and inks I use, actually.

The deep purple paint nearly disappears into the paper, but the opaque red pulls it into visibility, and both colors dye the salt here and there. I think I did tint this salt with ink as well, but I’m having a hard time remembering. The end result had a very ’70s feel to it to me, hence the title. Yeah, I said hence.

Mood Ring, 5″x5″ watercolor and salt on paper, $323 framed, with free shipping.

Something about the middle ring in the group of 3 catches the light much more than the other rings, which you can see in the detail below.

Mood Ring, detail 1, by Amy Crook

Below you can see the purple and red paint bleeding into the salt in the circles down in the lower right. I also made an iPhone wallpaper of the three central circles, and am sneaking it in here for those who read all the words.

Mood Ring, detail 2, by Amy Crook

And this one actually does fit into a frame, so you can see it next to my iPhone (for scale only, sorry) below.

Mood Ring, framed art by Amy Crook, $323

Cthulhu Necklace, collaboration with Shannon Henry

They’re almost ready!

Shannon Henry of Polymath Design Lab has been working with me to create a pair of awesome laser-cut necklaces. Cthulhu is in hand-dyed green leather, and the spiderweb (below) is made of black acrylic. We’re taking pre-orders for the first run, which will ship in March.

Check out Cthulhu and Spider’s Delight on Etsy!

Spider's Delight necklace, collaboration with Shannon Henry

Tentacle Deeps 25, watercolor painting by Amy Crook, $222

Tentacle Tuesday is upon us once again! I decided to go old school with this next set and paint the wash in the middle of the paper, which gives a very interesting edge to work with. This wash started golden yellow at the bottom and faded up to lemony yellow, but I wanted to give it a bit more oomph, so I went in with a deep goldenrod fine-point Sharpie marker and drew tiny crosshatching in all the background areas. The marker nearly fades into the watercolor down near the base of the tentacles, but you can see the texture clearly in the upper areas.

There’s something soothing about doing these really tedious patterns sometimes, especially since I can do a tiny area for just a minute or two and then do something else (mmmminternets), and then go back to it, which cuts up the process into manageable bites. Otherwise, my wrists might never forgive me!

Tentacle Deeps 25, 5.25″x5″ watercolor and Sharpie marker on paper, $222 framed, with free shipping.

Since this one’s slightly larger than a standard frame I didn’t get a photo of it in its new home yet, but you can see the texture of paper, paint and marker in the cool depth-of-field photo that I can’t resist taking every single time.

Tentacle Deeps 25, detail, by Amy Crook, $222

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.

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.

Sunset Bees by Amy Crook, $59

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, $59 with free shipping.

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, $59

Blue Moon by Amy Crook, $333

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.

This piece, and a number of my other moons, stars and skies, is up at Endgame in Oakland, CA for my mini-show Distant Skies. You can visit them in person upstairs in their open gaming area, and even buy them, which supports both the artist and the venue!

Blue Moon, 7″x5″ mixed media on paper, $333 framed, with free shipping.

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, $333

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.

Tentacle Spiral 2 by Amy Crook, $222

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 paper, $222 framed, with free shipping.

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.

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.

Flying Spaghetti Monster sketch by Amy Crook

Have you been Touched by His Noodly Appendage?

Brown Curls by Amy Crook, $199

Today’s piece uses the pink Himalayan sea salt on a wash of golden yellow. Then I made little curls around each salt pool in two shades of brown, which reminded me a bit of tumbling locks of curling brown hair in the sunshine, with gems or perhaps droplets of water caught in them.

Brown Curls, 4″x8″ salt and watercolor on paper, $199 framed, with free shipping.

Brown Curls, detail, by Amy Crook

Above you can see the way the minerals in the pink salt settle out and add their own pigment to the painting, as well as getting a sense of the subtle sparkle the salt adds to the painting. I ship the salt paintings safely framed so that the three-dimensional crystal structures arrive in place and ready to display.

Copper Beeches by Amy Crook, $323

This is one of those pieces that’s frustratingly difficult to color match or photograph in any reasonably representative way. The background is warm golds and orange-browns with layers of spirals in more browns and metallic copper. The salt pools are all centered over shiny copper spirals, though the salt itself didn’t pick up much color at all from either the background or the copper. There’s even a few golden leaves floating subtly through everything else, and that and the original Sherlock Holmes story are where the piece gets its name.

Copper Beeches, 8″x8″ salt and watercolor on paper, $323 framed with free shipping.

Copper Beeches, detail, by Amy Crook