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Crab Outlines and Silhouettes: 20 Blue, Hermit, King and Coastal Crab Designs
Sixteen crabs, including a blue crab with paddle-shaped back legs, a spiky king crab, a hermit crab in a spiral shell and a fiddler crab with one oversized claw, plus four shore scenes that pair a crab with a scallop, a sea star, seagrass or a second crab. Every design comes as a plain black silhouette and as a thin outline that traces the same edge.
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Plain black crab shapes, 20 of them, make up this set, and each one also comes as a thin outline that follows the same edge. The PDF pages call them large and small templates, and they suit printing and cutting in one color.
Sixteen crabs
Most of the single crabs are named kinds, each with the feature that gives it away. The blue crab (01) has paddle-shaped back legs, the king crab (02) a spiky shell and long spiny legs, and the hermit crab (03) sits tucked into a spiral shell with its antennae out. The fiddler crab (06) waves one oversized claw, the ghost crab (07) has its eye stalks up, and the spider crab (09) is a small body on very long, thin legs. The mud crab (08) and rock crab (11) have heavy claws, and the box crab (10) holds its claws folded in front of its body.
The rest are poses and characters: claws raised high (05), a tilted swimming crab (12), a sideways scuttle with one claw lifted (13), a low side profile (14) and a crab braced in a wide stance (16). Designs 04 and 15 are rounder, cartoon-style crabs with eye stalks on top.
Four shore scenes
The last four set a crab beside something else from the shore. Design 17 puts it next to a scallop shell, 18 pairs a one-clawed crab with a sea star, 19 adds a clump of seagrass, and 20 shows a large crab with a small one off to its upper right.
How the two styles compare
The silhouettes are solid fills with no inner lines, so each crab reads by its outline alone, the way a shadow would. The outline versions trace that same edge with a thin border and leave the middle open. When you import the DXF files, keep the inner contours, as the notes ask, since they’re what hold the center open.
All formats share a 10 x 6.5 inch artboard, and the crabs fill up to about 8.8 inches of its width. On the US Letter PDF, the full-page crabs print at about 5 to 6.5 inches on their longer side. The four-up and six-up sheets run through all 20 designs in order, so the last six-up page in each style has just two crabs. Print at 100%. The notes make no promise about how the files cut on a particular machine, so test your size and material first.
Questions
- Should I cut the silhouette or the outline?
- For a simple paper shape, start with the silhouette, as the notes for the vector files suggest. The outline is a thin border with separate inner and outer loops, so cutting it leaves a ring-like frame rather than a solid crab, and the notes say it isn't guaranteed to work as a one-piece stencil.
- Are the crab and the shell in the shore scenes joined?
- No. In designs 17 to 20 the scallop, sea star, seagrass and second crab are separate shapes from the main crab. Keep them grouped when you resize, and place them together on your project.
