Now roll out 2 even smaller balls. These are going to be the bottom claws. Once your bottom claws are made you can attach them.

Now you can put the legs together. To make sure they are relatively strong, blend the clay together underneath the arm. The smallest arm joint should be the one nearest the body.

Arrange your arms under the crab body to line them up. Once you have the body over the top and the arms are where you want them press down on the body. Then turn the crab over and blend the joints.

You have nearly finished your crab. All you need to do now is roll out 6 thin sausages. These are your crab’s legs. Just like you did with the arms of your crab, arrange the legs under the body and when you are happy that they are in the right place, press down on the body. Now turn your crab over and make sure the joins are good and strong.

Now you can get creative. You can give your crab antenna, a smile, a little set of jaws, anything you like.

After my workshop at the Bradford Animation Festival I thought it would be a good idea to pop up a tutorial for making a crab. This was something my lovely students seemed to enjoy making and were able to put their own creative stamp on their crab design, we even had a grinning crab at one stage.

I know a blue crab is not the norm but I couldn’t locate my block of red clay!

To start you need to make the body. You can experiment with different shapes if you like but I’m sticking with a basic crab body shape. Roll a large ball of clay (the size of a large marble) out between your palms (1). Pinch it to give it a bit of a taper (2). Use your finger tips to press what will look like bite marks around the top of the body (3).

Now you roll 6 balls; 2 large, 2 medium and 2 relatively small. These are going to be your crab’s arms.

Take your biggest arm balls and make them into this shape. These are going to contain the claws.

Now you make your claws. Roll out 4 smallish sized balls, 2 very small and 2 slightly bigger (6). Form the bigger balls into your top claws. Shape them into a claw shape with the tips of your fingers (7).

Check us out! Just before Eurogamer this year we were visited by the BBC pixies here at Tuna. During Eurogamer we made it on to the BBC Look North section on the BBC news. Aren’t we a pretty bunch.

We had a total blast at Eurogamer this year. It was really exciting to see people playing the game and receiving all of the positive feedback that you lovely chaps left us. We displayed Cletus Clay at both Leeds and London events and although we were a bit tucked away in London a lot of you made it to our stands and had a good old natter with Sarah, Alex and Andy which gave the day an extra pinch of awesome.

Recently I’ve been playing with ideas for a tutorial area. I always had a rough idea of how this would go, but as usual it comes out a little bit different once you actually sit down and try to work through all the details. The idea is that Cletus has a barn decked out with combat training equipment that he uses to prepare for Armageddon…or trespassers.