Re-Animator:  Reviving a Pre-paint from the Dead

by Jim Bertges

Have you ever looked at one of those pre-painted figures and said to yourself, “I could do a better paint job than that”?

First you’ve got to have some pre-painted statue on hand. If you don’t have one, go ahead and order something you like and we’ll get started while you await delivery.  I’m working on two pieces from X-Plus:  a 1/3 scale resin Frankenstein bank and a 1/6 scale Son of Frankenstein bust. Both are pretty nice sculptures, but as you can see from the before photos, their paint jobs need…..something (see below).

The first step in this process is to get to the sculpture under all that paint. Now, you may well ask, “What if I just touch up the existing paint?” Sure, you can do that, but you’d be surprised at what you may discover after stripping off the factory paint.  Because the factory paint is applied thickly and quickly, a lot of detail can be lost. After stripping you may well find details in the sculpture you never noticed before.

My stripper of choice (insert your own favorite stripper joke here) is Easy Off (now that I think of it, that could well be a stripper’s name) Oven Cleaner. Wearing protective gloves I applied a heavy coat of Easy Off to each piece and sealed them in plastic bags overnight. The following day, once again donning my protective gloves and some protective eye wear as well, I grabbed my trusty toothbrush (preferably an old one, not one you plan on using to clean your pearly whites with ever again), removed the busts from their plastic and scrubbed off as much of the paint as I could under some running water. Some bits were a little more stubborn than others, so I moistened a rag with lacquer thinner and removed them easily with a bit of rubbing.

Once the paint was off, I noticed two things; first, the paint had stained the resin in some places (which really didn’t matter) and second that these were pretty nice sculptures.  I did have one quibble with the Son of Frankenstein bust; the nose was way too narrow and pinched looking.  I remedied that by widening it out a bit with some Aves, making it look a bit more Karloffian (see above).

After giving both busts a coat of white primer, I decided to take two different approaches in painting them.  For the larger bust I broke out the old Iwata and for the smaller bust it was craft paints and hand brushing.  Of course, that was after I masked off the appropriate areas and sprayed bases and clothing with Krylon flat black.

The smaller bust went much more quickly. His furry vest was basecoated in Createx Transparent Iron Oxide to give it a reddish cast. I selected several light colors for his flesh tones, but included that same Iron Oxide for shading (below left). Using a stippling technique, I started with the dark colors in the deeper areas of his face and hands, then followed up with increasingly lighter shades of flesh tones with just a hint of green (below right). The stippling is all done while the paint is still wet which gives a more realistic blending to the colors. When the basic flesh colors had dried, I overcoated all the flesh areas with very pale green oil paint which was rubbed off long before it had a chance to dry. This left the skin looking pale and smooth with just a hint of green.

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