Crab Postcard

...the inside pocket....

   Okay, so on my last post you saw the whole booklet thang. Today I'm gonna show you the progression for the Crab Postcard that I had tucked away under the Briny Art panel. 

As usual, I start off with a simple pencil sketch. I'm not worrying about shading. I just want it's basic shape. I'm not very good at drawing from memory, so I hunted down a picture from Pinterest, that I could look at as a model for my crab. 

Next, I went over all my lines with a Micron pen. If you are trying to follow the way that I am doing it, let me just say, that you can use any fine tipped felt pen. It doesn't have to be Micron. Sharpie is my second go to. Heck, using several different sizes of tips, also is a good thing. It adds a lot of interest to the work. :) Keep in mind, though, if you are going to wash over it with watercolor, go with permanent ink. (Unless you want your lines to blur a little...which I sometimes like!) Just goes to show, it's difficult to make a mistake...and if you have, you can make it look intentional!

 I erased all of the pencil lines with a kneaded eraser. Then proceeded to do cross hatching as a method to make the shadows and roughness of the crab armor. Some artist can make the neatest of cross hatches...sometimes it looks like a machine did it because so perfect. ...Uh, I'm not one of those peeps! My cross hatching's are messy. ...Along some of the edges I went really dark to define the crab....

Starting at the top left pic...I further define the crab with a black Copic marker. This is one of those markers that might blur or bleed a little with watercolor, but I like it. ...Which takes me to the next pic in the cluster. I am adding some color. This time I'm only using two colors. the first one is Panye's Grey from a Inktense water color pencil. I don't want it to be a strong color, so I scribbled on a scratch piece of paper and loaded up my brush with water. ...I daubed up the color and wash it over the areas of the crab that has shadow. I leave spots white as well....it makes it look like a spot that has shine...

The second color comes from a cheap pan of dry watercolors. I guess I can call it violet? To add this color, I do a water wash over the area that will receive this color. With a brush full with water, I load my brush with color. I go in closest to the crab and work my way out. Allow the water on the paper to move some of the color around. You can lift your paper to help the color move and drip....

 Above is a close up of how I am adding the Inktense watercolor pencil. Some people will scribble on a non porous surface, but I like to use my scraps of watercolor paper. It helps me see what the color will look like on the actual paper. Anyhoot, the last pic in the above cluster shows that I have added some gold lines to the crab. There is no rhyme of reason to it....I just place in spots that I think make it look cool. :) The gold pen that I used was Sakura Gold Metallic Gelly Roll. Here it is close up...

 The pic below shows my finishing touches. I stenciled in "Briny" and "5" ...no reason for the 5...I just wanted to add some interest to the work. At the bottom, I used a rubber stamp from Cat's Life Press. (I believe there is a link to the right of this post. It's a great on-line rubber stamp store.) I only used half of the stamp. The full stamp says, "Artist Trading Card." Let's see, what else? Oh yes! I date stamped it, stippled silver dots with a Sakura Stardust Gelly Roll pen, aged the edges with Distress Ink and stamped a little flower with my sig.