Squid paint job 2

The following week I continued to build up the body and tentacles. And now I had to do some colour mixing. First colour to match was a pale blue pink for the two long extended tentacles... this took about an hour and a half to get right and involved some mixing, dabbing a little on the original colour then waiting for it to dry, as the colour darkens when it is dry. So I was adding a little blue, dabbing it, waiting for it to dry... then adding more blue or red and dabbing again and waiting for it to dry... this process was repeated well over 8 times to get the colour as close as I could to the original. During the drying times I would look in on the tanks in the room, which is the Ocean Zone of Bug World. Apart from Lola's tank (the European lobster) there was a small tank with bubble tip soft corals.

This tank is very pretty with the delicate pink of the soft coral and if you are patient and look carefully you can see other creatures in there too... there is a handsome red legged hermit crab, some bristleworms, brittlestars, button star, sponges, little brine shrimp type critters, tiny clams with feather dusters on them. I did spend a lot of my 'drying times' peering into this tank.

Once the blue pink tentacles were painted in I then had another major colour matching session for the maroon red, a pink colour for the undersides of the tentacles and a deeper blue for the  reflections on the squid body. Again it took several hours to get these colours as close as I could. I got the maroon red done first and applied that over the new amendments on the tentacles blending into the old paint to soften the  effect of any tiny colour difference. 

Colour matching the blue. I had three tubes of acrylic paint to add to the emulsion to see which would make the blue I wanted. Cerulean blue, Windsor blue and Ultramarine blue. In the end I used a mix of Windsor and Ultramarine adding a large amount to a small quantity of the background blue.

This blue was dry brushed over the top edges of the squid's body and tentacles to give some form and indicate a bit of reflection from the water. I used the pink to paint in the undersides of the tentacles and add some under reflection on the squid's body. Again dry brush strokes blended the new paint to the old.

The finished squid 1

The finished squid 2

The finished squid 3

I stayed after work on one evening to paint the two areas at either end of the squid; one end (the 'doorway' into the next section of Bug World) to add the tail fluke and blue background and the other to continue the background round to the edge of the mural in the 'halfway exit'. Both of these areas would have been difficult to paint without causing inconvenience to the visitors. So it was easier and ultimately quicker and safer for me to paint them when the 'house' was shut in the evening.

On the final thing to do was to add the suckers on the tentacles. For these I used some potatoes cut up into 'stamps' with three sizes of circles and two sizes of half circles. I dipped these into white emulsion and dabbed them onto the tentacles. And that was it... all done. It has taken about three weeks in all to get prepared for and actually paint, but it was fun to do and the Ocean Zone inhabitants kept me interested during the times I was waiting for paint to dry.     

This is 'Satan', a velvet swimming crab and the top predator in the Rock Pool Tank. He/she is a beautifully marked and coloured crab, which does not show up in this photo. He/she shares the tank with other crabs, a goby fish called 'Obi Wan Gobi', anemones, hermit crabs and various other invertebrates. Again another good tank to watch patiently.