Well, you can’t accuse me of selling out. While I love jumping spiders, I can’t imagine there is a huge market for detailed watercolors of them. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong. For a while frogs and toads were among my best-selling prints—of course they have better PR than the jumping spiders. People are willing to see frogs and toads as cute. The jumping spiders eat many of the same things as the frogs and toads. The jumping spiders are equally harmless, yet many people just can’t see a spider, even a cute little jumping spider with its fuzzy body and goggle eyes, without getting the creeps. *SIGH*
This small painting was actually one of the harder things I’ve done in watercolor for a while. There was a large variety of textures to render, including the metallic green, reflective goggle eyes, the spider’s hairy body and spiky legs, the satin-like leaves, the blurry background and over a hundred tiny hollow, rounded florets in shades of greens, yellows and oranges. Because of this complexity I scanned in more stages of this than any other step-by-step that I’ve worked on. Hopefully the presence of a tiny spider won’t scare anyone away from seeing how it was made.
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