As you may have surmised from the title of today's post, I have started painting corpsy! I had hoped to have started this over the weekend but, we had rain. Enough rain to make it incredibly humid. I was worried that the snot ragging wouldn't be dry enough or that, if I started painting, he would take too long to dry. I only want him to look like a rotting corpse, not actually be one.
Going back in time for a moment, I had mentioned that the tissues dipped in glue that I used for snot ragging went all transparent on me. Check it out:
All the white bits are tissues, but I covered the whole body with them. Anywhere you see newsprint you're seeing through the tissues! I've already put that characteristic to good use, I'll have a post up in a few days when I get done with them. (-:
Now, on to the important bit. Painting corpsy! The first thing you need, besides the corpse (obviously!), is paint. The interwebs suggest getting unloved latex paint from your local purveyor of such goods. By unloved paint I mean the stuff that gets mixed and doesn't turn out just right. They don't toss it, they mark it down and sell it to anyone who will take it. Now, the interwebs also say that you should get a nice, neutral tan-ish color and then add orange and black acrylic paint to it to get that nice, rotting flesh tone. I say don't buy more than you have to; if you can find a nice orangey paint, why not get it and save yourself a step? That's exactly what worked out for me.
Behold! My $7 gallon of Behr Premium Plus latex paint! Yeah, you heard me, $7! For a gallon! It's amazing the deals you can get when you don't have to be fussy about the color. (Can you tell I'm inordinately proud of my can of unloved paint? I think I unnerved the nice paint guy that re-shook the can for me, I was so pleased with the paint.)
So, orange paint and black tint in hand I set out to make my corpse flesh tone. It took more black than I expected; probably close to 2 tablespoons in close to 2 cups of paint, but that's just an estimate.
A bit of mixing, and voila! An almost sickly flesh tone. My camera doesn't really do it justice, think zombie oompa loompa and you'll about have the color. The orange isn't oompa loompa orange, but it isn't too far off.
Now for the fun part. I love painting things. There's a reason my house has 10 different colors in it. Granted, half of them are on trim, but that still leaves me 5 colors on the walls, but I digress. Here is corpsy, all laid out and ready for painting.
Painting him was rather like painting a very textured wall, if the wall could melt slightly. It's that adding moisture thing again. If you do this make sure you paint in defined sections so that you don't have to keep going over areas multiple times. The snot rags do not like it. The texture actually makes that a bit of a problem. You see, you end up having to stipple (dabbing the brush like you're trying to poke paint into the little holes between texture, because you are) quite a bit and the softer the tissues get the harder it gets to make the paint go in all the little crevasses. I'll be dry brushing him later to make the texture pop, but this is the base coat so I need good coverage and I'll probably be doing a second coat to make sure I didn't miss too many spots. That said, I did dry brush a section on the abdomen so I could see how the eventual top coat would look. I think I'll be happy with it, it looks awesome.
A bit of work later and I have a base coated corpse! Well, on the ventral side anyway. I still have to do the back. But he's starting to actually look like a people! I am quite pleased with how this layer of paint went.
With the close up you can really see some of the texture.
He does look a bit disproportionate and rightly so, because he is, but I think once I have him hanging by his ankles and wrapped in cloth and webbing it won't be too noticeable
Had I thought about what the snot ragging would do, I would have painted the last mache layer and done a few layers of snot rag mache over it. The texture rather makes him look like he's already covered in webbing, don't you think? That plus the clear drying of the snot rags would have made an epic corpse, too.
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