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.
