#169 8/8/19 Big Blue Crab #1

I finally had to mentally override my procrastination all week and get started on the bigger crabs that were on the menu.  The canvases were prepped, I just kept finding other nonsense to attend to each evening.  So after dinner tonight, the newspaper, the dishes, the this and the that, I sat down at the desk and got started.  My desk is a wreck.  I'd take a picture of it, but it's embarrassing.  Picture a 5 ft by 3 ft surface....15 generous square feet, with just a 16 x 9 inch plot of space in front of the keyboard without anything on it but paint smudges.  And that little part is full of canvas during the painting sessions.  I'm still attaching every canvas to a larger piece of cardboard with double-sided foam tape, seriously my best idea ever, as it allows me to handle the canvas easily at all kind of angles as well as paint the sides of the canvas without making a mess on anything important.  I keep the canvas on the cardboard to the very end, ie when the paint is dry enough to varnish and the varnish is dried.  At that point I remove it from the cardboard and if I'm gentle enough on the removal the double sided tape can be used again.  Every once in a while, on the canvas boards, the paper backing rips a bit and I have to glue it back down.  The gesso'd canvas boards are sometimes printed on the back with headings and spaces to fill in the name of the artwork, the medium, the artist and the date.....depending on the manufacturer of the board.  I also add my sequential number in my "Quest of 300".

Last fall, during my oil painting class at The Delaplaine, I was having trouble figuring out where all the paintings we worked on were going to dry....they ended up stashed on top of random things up high around the house.  A bit ridiculous.  When I started the idea of the Quest...knowing they would all be smaller things on cardboard, I decided I would need to invest in a drying rack, nothing too big, something I could put out of sight.  Well, hell's bells, those drying racks cost a small fortune!  Then I stumbled upon the most perfect contraption at a Home Goods store.  A metal stand, the kind we older folk used to put our LP Albums in, with the record player on the shelf above.  Only $39.95.  Sold!  I will share a picture of this one....it sits in the corner of my living room, not exactly out of sight, but it keeps me moving things into their proper stages of being completed.  The wet-wet ones sit horizontally on the shelves, after about 2 weeks they can be moved to the vertical slots, when I run out of slots I know it's time to varnish a few.  The Gamvar product that I'm using has instructions on it's website and claims the oil paintings can be varnished after you can no longer put a fingernail into the paint and that the oil paint will continue to dry for about 6 months even with the varnish applied.  I don't really paint that thick, although this crab that I just finished as some thick spots.

So, the crab.  Loose, I was going for loose (or looser than my normal).  I had a photo of a real crab with the most beautiful colors in his front claws.  I started with a 8x10 inch black wrapped canvas, painted the center red with acrylic (for a good under-color), put down the sketch (no, dang you, it wasn't free-handed, nag!), then began the painting itself.  Off-white parts first (with my un-polluted fresh brush, a 1/2 inch angle brush), then I mixed in some phalo blue with the white to get the different tones of blue for the crabby leg parts.  Low and behold, I grabbed a fresh brush to mix up the greenish-olive color for the crab body: white, cad-orange, perm-green-light.  And another smaller brush with the raw umber shadowy parts.  And another smaller fresh brush for the orange, yellow and purple parts.  Four brushes for one painting - it was a milestone event in my Quest.  I cleaned the brushes of excess paint along the outer edges figuring I'd paint over it at the end.  But I decided I kind of liked the primitive look about it.  I got mixed reviews on that decision from Joe.  He said it made the crab look less free....and that the blue on the edges took away from the blue on the crab...and that he dislikes guitars that have the neck the same color as the body and that's the same feeling he was getting with my border around the crab.  I'm keeping it this way though...tomorrow's crab will maybe have a different border style.