Artist's Note:

I engaged in this project for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to see just how much work I could get done in Procreate as a solo tool; and secondly because I wanted to paint something translucent. These gemlike creatures both bear resemblance to crabs in terms of their body structure and the way they are able to move. They don’t build webs, instead acting as ambush predators. They will sit in a flower, and grab any passing creature they might like to eat. Some can even change colour over a short period to match the flower they live in. Others (but not this one) mimic bird faeces to blend in more out in the open. This is good camouflage for defence as well as to help them ambush other creatures. There is quite a variety among the 2100 species that we know of. They can be found over most of the planet.

There is something about subsurface scattering that I’ve always found fascinating, likely from the first time I put a lit torch against the palm of my hand and looked at the red glow coming through the webbing of my fingers. Through my work doing 3d graphics I spent a fair bit of time fiddling with subsurface scattering settings in programs like Maya and Blender trying to get it to look just right. It is a very challenging thing to get to work convincingly and at a setting that isn’t too computationally expensive. Basically, it is an attempt to replicate the way light travels into a surface (like your skin or a Crab Spider), bounces around inside it, and then comes out scattered on the other side. Only some of the light makes it, and this is why we get that glowing orangey-red when we shine a torch into our hands. Directly painting subsurface scattering that looks convincing is a different challenge as well, one for which I thought this transluscent Crab Spider was perfect for. For more info on them, see here.