Thursday, November 2, 2017

Maryland Blue Crab

I am working on a crab painting and decided to do it like an illustration.  It's a fun way to display an object you like and put words and descriptions to it.  Later I plan on making a copy of it and mounting it to a wooden board.  They make great gifts inexpensively.

To start this painting I used 3 main colors for the background.  Yellow ochre and ultramarine blue mixed with some thalo blue.  I wet the whole paper first and then just added those colors where I felt I wanted to and gave it some balance.  Later while slightly wet I spattered with some sap green and some of the blue I used.  To give it more texture I spattered with just water when the paper began to dry a little bit.  


After that all dried, and you can see the spattered water better on this next photo, I started working on the lettering.  I decided I wanted it multicolored and I used winsor red, thalo blue mixed with ultramarine, yellow ochre (M. Graham brand - it's lighter and less opaque than the Winsor Newton brand)  and some sap green.  I decided to do the letters "Blue Crab" in blues and green...(thalo mixed with ultramarine and dropping in yellow ochre to get a green)

Painting the crab I started with the main big shell.  I started by painting the top with raw sienna halfway down and then stopping and adding an olive green color that I created combining ultramarine blue + raw sienna.  I also added some watery ultramarine blue toward the eyes where it gets a little bluer and lighter in value.  Using perinone orange (Daniel Smith) I added that on edges and on those end points that I call jewelry!  The backfin I painted by laying down raw sienna first and then painting over it while wet with thalo blue.  While almost dry I outlined the edges in perinone orange.  The claws will be done in the same way using the same colors.  I will use more straight out thalo blue for most of the claws.





Finished crab painting.