"The Living Dummy" - The Puppet

“Who you calling dummy, dummy?”

R.L. Stine

Happy Friday, and welcome back to your weekly break for The Art of Caesura!

So, have you got any Easter eggs left? Me neither!

Yet another creepy World of Smog mini. I feel like that is becoming the best descriptor for these guys: creepy! We’ve had a guy with a buzz saw fora neck bursting through a woman’s chest, a kid with a horse-skull for a head, a corpse with coins for eyes, and a dude with an alien larva busting out of hisface. Yep, creepy. Now let’s add this guy to the mix:

The Puppet

“The Puppet was used for months by the Grand Guignol Variety of Hammersmith theatre in macabre and bloody skits that disturbed even the most malicious spectator, before the evil fairy Befana decided to enchant the puppet. Her dark spell gave it life while on stage. It stabbed its ventriloquist and ended the show beside his corpse. The crowd loved it. Now the Puppet performs in the Shadow Market.”

The World of Smog: On Her Majesty’s Service

As soon as I held the actual plastic model I was hit with a strong recollection of reading all of the old Goosebumps books as a kid, you remember the Night of the Living Dummy series by R.L. Stine with Slappy the Dummy? Those books scared the crap out of me as a kid!

I was looking at pictures of ventriloquist dummies for inspiration and found that most of them were just kind of painted a normal flesh tone and that it was their eyes that were their most eerie feature. With this mini they slapped specs over his eyes. It took me a while to decide how to pain those glasses. On the “box art” the glasses are painted like red spirals on a white base, invoking hypnotism, but I thought it would be more disturbing to have old-timey blind-person glasses.

I also put quite a bit of thought into the “skin” colour for The Puppet. As I mentioned, ventriloquist dummies are often just painted a flat skin tone. I decided that I wanted a paler tone to really contrast the black glasses. I worked up to a grey-white colour and then decided on a blue glaze. What I would have done if I’d had a Games Workshop, or FLGS near me is used some blue ink, like Drankenhof Nightshade, but instead I improvised and diluted Altdorf Guard Blue with about a million parts of Lahmain Medium and glazed his white head with that. It worked pretty well, but was more translucent than ink (more like milk). I wonder what would have happened if I mixed the blue paint with gloss varnish? Hmmm…I’ll have to try that sometime.

I painted on some areas where his paint has chipped and some foul blue-green ichor is leaking out to break up the large flat surfaces, and then painted his clothes bright gaudy colours.

Thanks again for checking out The Art of Caesura.

Reading: When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi

Listening: Glanfaidh Me - Kíla

Gaming: Rocksmith 2014 – Ubisoft

Watching: Batman V Superman

Next Week:

Tasting and judgement…