The Thing's Childs

 Having a few collections to complete I decided that Childs from the 1982 movie The Thing was desk on the table. The character, Childs, was played by actor Keith David, and was the base's mechanic. Keith points out that Child's breaks the Horror film trope that "the black guy never makes it to the end of the film."  He is part of the Childs/McReady controversy in that who was the Thing at the end...

 The kit came in 7 parts - the bust, base, gloved hand, whiskey bottle, and 3 appendages. The likeness is spot on and the casting as usual with Gillman is nearly flawless.  With this piece, the Yagher, the sculptor, gives away two of his ideas of how things ended. Number one the base is created to look like a generator, which answers MeReady's question :How's the generator," and Garry answers "It's gone, MacReady!" As a sidebar Garry was his last name. On the character list he was M.T. Garry. 

 The Yagher also gives his opinion of whether Childs or McReady, neither or both were infected. From the front Child's portrait is spot on. But from the back you see his head is split open and all sort's of gooey things are emerging. 

As usual I start with the portrait. I don't get to do dark skin all that much so I was glad I picked up a number of Army Painter skin double triads (6 colors that all blend) . I started withe the darkest one, and then I really didn't like many of the companion colors as they seemed too desaturated. I had seen another painter use oranges to highlight the skin, so I turned to my set of rust paints.  A few different layers and I was liking what I had so far. 

 Turning to the back of the head I added various reds and oranges to make the wound. My thoughts on wounds and blood is that a little goes a long way. I went too far, so I got some Agrax Earthshade to darken down the crevices and ended my session there. 

Coming back to it the next day I see disaster struck. I had angled the bust face down at an angle so the wash would dry in all the recesses. What it did was to rundown the head and then gravity would take it around to the bottom which from that angle was the face.  I now had this  dark stripe running across the face and down to the chin where it dried. I tried lightly getting it off. It didn't really work that well. So I got out the paints and had Take 2 of doing the portrait. After getting it fixed, I sprayed it with a matte clear to protect the new paint (which I didn't do the first time). Tragedy struck again as the matte clear coat instantly frosted. I had heard that if you quickly spray it with a gloss, the frost goes away. The frost did go away - mostly. Disgusted, I chose to walk away rather than whip it off the wall. Check back.