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

Harry Potter Valentine cartoon by Amy Crook

I wanted to make a silly Harry Potter Valentine card this year for my friends who love these characters, since not all of my friends got all fannish about Sherlock the way I did. One of them suggested Snape teaching Harry to brew those candy message hearts, and after googling for some bad Latin, this is the card front.

Of course, I couldn’t stop there, we had to see the results!

Harry & Snape's Candy Hearts

As you can see, someone’s got a bit of a crush on his teacher, but Snape’s still in denial. I’m sure it’ll have a happy ending, though.

Apericordis, 7″x5″ pen and ink and Copic markers on paper. You can get your own copy of this silly little card here on Etsy.

Tentacle Deeps 24 by Amy Crook, $222

It’s Tuesday the 24th, which is the perfect day for Tentacle Deeps 24, don’t you think? It’s a good thing I’ve got it all ready to go.

I have really been enjoying my block of 4″x8″ watercolor paper, especially for the tentacles, although it means I’ll need to figure out a framing and matting situation for them sooner or later. I like the sense of depth it gives them with the extra vertical space above, in this case where the yellows shine in and then filter down through the textured space into bluer greens at the bottom. The tentacles are scribbled in with fountain pen on the black and brush pen on the grey.

Tentacle Deeps 24, 4″x8″ pen and ink and watercolor on paper, $222 framed, with free shipping.

I have to admit, I think every single one of the Tentacle Deeps paintings looks cool photographed this way, so I will probably never stop adding in the gratuitous creepy detail shots.

Tentacle Deeps 24, detail, by Amy Crook

Moon Valley watercolor by Amy Crook, $299

I’ve been working for many months now on the re-launch of Moon Valley Astrologer, and it’s finally up, huzzah!

I used watercolors to create both the Moon Valley header art and the background of stars, though as you can see there was some Photoshop tomfoolery on her final header to make the moon more like a proper orange harvest moon. Not to mention the cropping and text!

Moon Valley Astrologer header by Amy Crook

This site was a huge undertaking, but I’m really happy that it’s all come together in time, and I look forward to continuing to work with Celeste as the site continues to grow. And of course my faithful code minion, Michael, who does the heavy lifting of implementing my designs with best practices.

The painting itself went through several practice versions, including the very creepy-sky study Mountains of Madness. This final has a peaceful, luminous quality that I think really goes well with her site and personality. Although it’s not really a portrait of the actual Moon Valley where she lives, it conveys the feeling we were hoping for in subtle, inviting colors that we then echoed into the rest of the site.

Moon Valley, 14″x8.5″ watercolor on paper, $299 with free shipping.

Coloring Book Doodle 48 - Tentacle Heart Cyclops

I scanned #49 today, too, and it’s hard to believe I’ve done that many of these doodles. I don’t always manage to draw in books (wholesale orders don’t get them, or last-minute-zomg ones), and sometimes I draw and forget to scan, but still. Nearly 50! That’s a lot of tentacles.

And yet, this guy is unimpressed. Isn’t that always the way?