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).

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 13:49 and is filed under development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.