Well, this can go down as one of the more odd jobs that I've done in my career. Earlier this week, I was hired to realistically paint various limbs for a cover shoot for Standard Pacific magazine. It was such a blast!
I used a combo of Liquitex and FW inks, Golden Acrylic High Flow, and Premiere Product's Skin Illustrator, which is an alcohol-based waterproof makeup. These limbs actually started out being those super crappy Halloween props that are pre-painted with those sort of caveman-looking bones sticking out the ends of them. The prop designer/art director for the shoot cut off the ugly bones and stripped them down with a citrus stripper, and it turned out really remarkable. Once they were stripped and cleaned out, they were filled with red paint and plaster.......and turned out pretty amazing. I wish I could take credit for that part of this process - it was so clever, and really turned these terrible Halloween props into something really usable. I then took over, painting them for days with different types of natural/latex-free/orange sponges and various tiny brushes, in order to really capture all of the minute details in real human limbs - i.e. veins, cuticle colors, mottling the base colors to represent blood flow and differentiations in skin tones, etc. I can easily say that this is one of the projects that I am most proud of. Painting realistically is really, really difficult, and I was up for the challenge, and they turned out pretty rad. Even in person, they have a really creepy "real" feel to them. The magazine comes out in November, and I'll post it when I get it in!
Click through the pics to see some detailed images of all of the limbs. Thanks for reading! :)