It’s made out of meat

With the beastman out of the way, I’ve been mostly busy working on Lady Gaga in the meat dress, and I’ve been reasonably productive in that regard. In order to avoid the constant restarting I suffered last time I tried to paint her, I started from the top down. This was also sensible, because she’s delicate but also rather long, which meant I had to handle her quite a bit while painting the upper half.

This also gave me some time to think about how to approach the tights, and I think I worked out a decent method that I really should have thought of to begin with: just paint the tights first. My previous efforts had been based on getting the skin right before using glazes or other methods to paint the tights over that, but inevitably when I was finally happy with the skin, I was forced to scrap it all when the tights went wrong.

I was also less concerned about getting the skin right when I got to the legs because I’d worked out the recipe and techniques by the time I got there from having done her face and arms. As I say, I really should have figured that out a while ago.

Anyway, in the end, I’m reasonably happy with the legs. Not thrilled with them, but I’ve had so many issues trying to sort out the sculpt on her front leg that I’m mostly just happy to have it done and out of the way. I’ll no doubt try to poke at it as I work on her wee booties, but I think there are real limitations that can’t be fixed without just carving the knee away entirely and trying to resculpt it (again), and I’m well past caring that badly.

So, to the pictures:

The dress I’m very pleased with. It only took a little bit of thinking to figure out the method for it, and I was quite pleased when the first part I attempted came out well. It’s basically underpainted in ochre, then glazed in reds and purples, with a touch of chestnut for the sinews.

Of course, this leads me in neatly to the title of the post, which is a reference to a very fun short story by Terry Bisson called They’re Made out of Meat, which was also turned into a marvellous short film. I highly recommend both.

With Gaga rapidly approaching completion, I need to start prepping for the next few pieces in the series, which all, sadly, will require a lot of sculpting. I should really know better by now.

The blank that Gaga is based on also came with a set of ‘parts’ so you can build your own figure with at least some basis for the anatomy. Like Gaga, however, some bits are basically unusable. Like the face, pictured below alongside the Hornet head that I’ll use instead.

It should be relatively obvious which face I’ll be using. Feel free to guess who this head will be going on. By the next post, I should have at least built up the parts so make it a bit easier to guess.

I also have a couple more figures on the way for the other models going in the series, one of which should be considerably simpler than the others, so I might get a bit distracted between the models as I get annoyed by the sculpting.