Ben Grimm - The Thing from Fantastic Four

Well I have posted a few big pieces in the past.. and I have a few more in the pipeline, but this one is quite interesting. Picked it up while I picked up the Steampunk girl, but unlike that bust this one I am not as much scared of :) I picked both of them up from Fantasy Realms here in the UK, but they came from different sculptors and locations.

As you can see from the comparison of the 28mm model below... it is a wee bit big as well. Thankfully it only comes in 2 pieces.. the bust.. and the plinth. Of which they require some major gap filling to be done.

It also arrived in a massive box to hold the 2 pieces, but really well wrapped up. Not that I think this would get wrecked in shipment within UK.. since it is basically a huge chunk of resin...

There were a few major mold lines on this piece however as it is clear that it was casted with a 2 piece mold system.

Nothing a sharp xacto blade could not handle, but still some major shifting in the mold happening here.

There were also some air bubbles throughout the piece. I filled the terrible ones, but left some of the smaller ones as they add character to the rock formations. That and I missed some of them and was eager to just get painting!

Up first was the main section of the body.. the blue spandex suit. Some might criticize the fact that he is wearing it at all, but honestly, without it then it would just be a massive pile of stones ( which I guess he is.. ) and not that much fun to paint up. need some variety here!

I did this fully with the airbrush over the black/white 2k Primer I put on him. I used the Andrea Color Blue set for this, as I really liked the tone it was bringing with it. I can go a lot further with the airbrush, as explained by the 5th-dimension crew, but I want to be able to play around with the brush a bit more on this guy though.

From here, I masked it off with Humbrol Maskol ( this stuff reaks! use in a well ventilated area and with a mask! ) and began to lay down the colors for his skin.

When the Maskol dries it shows up really shiny. But peals off semi well enough ( took a bit of paint with it. Shows that I need to work on my prep and cleaning phase better! ).

Fantasy Realms had provided me with a can of their Freak Flex Badger color Eye of the Ogre Orange for this guy. I guess it would be great for those looking to do up large pieces and have the ready made colors there for them. But for me, I wanted to utilize some of the skills I learned in BAM2 with Raffa on maximizing the areas on the model. So I stuck with some of the techniques we worked on back in October in Hamburg here instead.

I took Vallejo Model Color Red Leather as a base, and mixed it with Grey. Again using the desaturated mode to give me some room to play around on this piece. It also gave me a color that I most associate with The Thing from my childhood comics, and thus gave me the motivation to keep going since I seems I am in the right place now!

Form this color I will move back and forth from Shadows to Light using colors like VMC Mahogany Brown, VMC Black, VMC Sunny Skin Tone ( Thanks Roman for this color trick! ), VMC White, and the VMC Dark Sea Grey for desaturation.

Now comes the really really fun, and time consuming part, of the model... details and layering...

I have started already on the right shoulder to get an idea on how it will look. I have to say that I feel like I am painting a basketball here.. not a bad thing, just interesting :) I would say that this is about 60% into the right directions, but much more is needed. I am treating the entire shoulder first as a section, and then will dive more into the rock sections each to play the shadow/light more into them.

To get an idea on where those will be, I took a photo under the normal room lights to get a better sense of where those could be. And then played around with it in MS Photo.. just to see where I need to focus more on the larger groups for shadows and light.

Honestly though I am really liking the direction of him already though.. and really cannot wait to get further along with him. Though expect that it will take some time, and I will begin another topic along side him just to keep things fresh and not spam this place with nothing but this guy! Especially since I suspect that all I will be working on in the next while is just the shadow/light sections on the rock for a bit, then again on the blues.. no real detail works for a while yet to come. Which is going to be very daunting for me to keep the motivation on this guy up with the progress levels going to come from him.

Anyways hope you all like him.. and let me know your thoughts below!!!