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.

Frank von Stein Part 1

 It's been quite a while since I've updated this blog. I haven't been too productive over the past two years. But I'm hoping to get back to painting on a more regular basis and ideally will get back to sharing my projects here too.

As we're approaching Halloween, I decided to work on the 75mm Frank von Stein from Terrible Kids Stuff. I began this project back in March and did the initial shading and highlighting on the skin and pants. Now that I've returned to the project I made some adjustments (highlights on his upper body weren't quite right and needed to be rebalanced) and then went in with glazes to add color variation and bring the skin to life as it were. Some subtle red glazes around the sutures, implants, and in the cheeks. Some purple glazes around the veins. And finally a little bit of blue glazing in select shadows.

The skin tone was based in AK's Grey Green. I added a 50/50 mix of AK's Basalt Grey and Reaper's Walnut Brown to that for the shadows (with Black added to anywhere which needed to be even darker). Highlights were done by adding AK's Green Grey to their Grey Green (yeah, not the most helpful names). And final highlights were done with Reaper's Linen White.

I'm working in the Grey Green and Green Gray into just about every mix used on the piece (including the metallics) to give the entire piece a green shift.