Meet Rockland artist Megan Rogers, who grew up attending the Maine Lobster Festival. For the second year in a row, she was commissioned to paint a theme for the 71st Festival poster.

Notice the trio of unusual colors: yellow, blue and albino white. As noted in our February blog “The Rarest Color of Lobsters,” the natural colors of most live lobsters are a mottled greenish brown to blackish brown, but when a genetic abnormality causes a lobster to produce an excessive amount of a particular protein, it produces fantastic colors rarely found in nature.

“I wanted to showcase the mutation colors in the poster because they are so cool,” said Rogers. “And all three of those were painted from photos I took of actual lobsters at Brooks Trap Mill. Local fisherman will bring rare lobsters to Brooks’ boat shop and they’ll keep them in their salt water tank for customers to view.”

While Rogers balanced her full-time job as a music teacher for three area schools, along with being a mom, she would spend her evenings creating this oil painting, which took about 15-20 hours. “After I put my son to bed, I’d usually paint for two or three hours,” she said. “It took about four or five sessions.”

Like last year’s poster, the fonts and design have a retro feel, thanks to Jeffrey Thibodeau and his team at Brio Promotions in Rockland. “I didn’t paint it with that nostalgic feel, but with Jeff’s choice of lettering, it was a match made in Heaven,” said Rogers, adding, “It sort of reminds me of those 1950s monster movies: ‘It came from the deep!’”

As for people’s reaction to last year’s poster, Rogers said, “It was fantastic. A lot of people responded so well to the poster because it had a real lobster with natural coloring. I heard people say they appreciated that it wasn’t red, but that it was the color that they’d always associated with a live lobster.”

Rogers said she is proud to have completed the poster for the Maine Lobster Festival. “I just wanted to show the hard-working spirit of the lobster industry itself,” she said. 

Find out more here about the people who put their time into making the Maine Lobster Festival a spectacular annual event.