Acrylic on canvas. THE WATERMARK IS MY INSTAGRAM.
This piece I practiced not putting down any sketch lines at all and just painting what I see. My reference was from the Adobe Stock images. I have attached the image here.
Synopsis:
I started by mapping the shapes out in white after I put in the background. The background was fairly easy and did not take very long. It was simple gradients with dry brush techniques used to create the white shoreline. I used primary blue and paynes gray for the ocean. I used yellow ochre, red, primary blue and some sienna brown for the sand. Most of it is the ochre color mixed with the others to create it. I wanted it to be easy to go back and fix any errors in case I messed up on the crab.
After that, I started with the eyes. Trying to color match proved to be a challenge and I ended up defining the eyes with mars black in order to make it pop against the water. This is a detail I later decided to extend to the rest of the crab to separate shapes. I started in filling in the light yellow base and darker shades. I established the main body first and then I painted each limb ligament by ligament. A few of them I cleaned up using the background sand colors. After the base color was in, I filled in the shades first while the paint was still wet. Then I waited for the paint to dry and added the lighter shades. Later I decided to add crimson and pink to the crabs body in order to give it some life and match the reference as red is also present at each joint. After I finished the legs, I came back to the crabs body and finished the mouth. The mouth was the hardest part of this piece. The mouth is just so incredibly detailed, it was difficult actually shaping the piece to imitate the reference photo.
After the mouth, I finished the crabs claws last using the same wet blending technique. Lastly, I highlighted and lined the legs and claws with more white to give the illusion of the crabs spines.
One the white paint dried, I then mixed the shadow of the crab. This color I used a mixture of ultramarine blue, cadium yellow medium hue, and yellow ochre to form a yellow tinted green-blue shade which mimics the blue color of the blue shadow in the reference image. The shadow I used a wet brush technique where I used water to make the paint very transparent. This technique is a little hard to work with acrylic because if it is too wet then it's too runny and if its too thick then it doesnt give you the transparency of the shadow that you need as you want the yellow to show through.
I used a small liner brush to apply this.
Finally, I took marks black and used my thinnest, smallest line brush (A 10/0 size) and lightly outlined the parts I felt needed to pop. After it all dried, I then applied 2 coats of a matte varnish.