Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Frank Von Stein - Part 2

Unlike the last project, this is a project I began in the past year and actually managed to finish it too! I was taken with this version of Frankenstein's monster from Terrible Kids Stuff as soon as I saw it. I liked the weird world war take on this classic monster character.


My goal with the project was to stick with a limited, desaturated palette. While I didn't want to simply paint him in black and white, I did want to bring to mind the look of those old monster movies with a limited use of color. Also, as Frankenstein seems to be associated with the color green, I worked a bit of desaturated green into all of my color mixes for the piece. It's not as obvious to my eyes when I look at the entire piece, but if I put it next to a neutral grey then the color shift is more apparent to me.


This piece also gave me another opportunity to make use of the 3D printer for basing. I didn't sculpt any of the background, but I created the basic plinth and wedge for the wall behind the figure. Then I took wall and floor textures from files I got through Print and Play Minis Deathburg kickstarter, clipped, and merged them in Blender to create the primary scene. The box came from Keta Minies kickstarter, also clipped to fit the scene. And the rats came from a recent release from Loot Studios (also clipped from a larger piece). I then added the electric cables using two different sized pieces of wire.






Here's a closer look at the skin. I really enjoyed experimenting with unnatural skin tones on this figure. You can check my first post on this figure to see the details of the color mix I used on the skin.



Onitsukaji Part 3 - Completed

I recently returned to this project from 2019. I was really happy with the start on this orc but got bogged down in painting the sash around his waist. Seems like a silly thing to get stuck on, especially since you can barely see it in most of the views below. But I found trying to paint the sculpted on texture to be a pain and it took away a lot of the joy from painting the piece.


But, I was looking for a project to use in a Secret Santa mini exchange and decided this would be a great subject. Plus I could use the extra motivation to get me through my painters block on this figure and actually finish him! 


After painting the figure, I took advantage of a 3D printer I'd picked up a little over a year ago to print out a few props for the base. While I've used it for a number of figures, I also really value the ability to resize and print scenery objects to fit whatever scale figure I'm working on. It's given me a lot more freedom to come up with more details for the scenes I'm creating.