Painting The King Kong Casting

I'm going to have to skim over making Kong's shoulders and attaching his head. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of this stage of the work. It was pretty straight forward. I cut a piece of 1/4" plywood for the base. The shoulders were cut from the same 1/4" plywood stock. I stapled wire mesh screening over the plywood form.

I mixed up a batch of paper mache and covered the screening. After about an hours time I gently worked over the shoulders with a plastic spatula to smooth and further shape them.

Several days later after the mache had dried I coated it with Liquitex Matt Medium to seal it. Finally I covered the entire shoulder area with Apoxie Sculpt Clay giving it a fur texture and blending it up and into Kong's cast head.

The mouth and eyes were masked off and the sculpture was sprayed with gray auto primer. Next I began dry brushing on white acrylic paint where I wanted hi lites. Working light to dark I next dry brushed on light gray, followed by raw umber. When I was finished with my dry brushing I sprayed the sculpture with Krylon Matt clear spray to protect the paint.

The last step was antiquing Kong with a mix of thinned down black and raw umber acrylics. This would tie all the dry brushing work together. I worked in small sections wiping off the excess antiquing medium till I achieved the effect I was looking for.

Now came the time to begin creating the native that would be struggling in Kong's mouth. I roughed out the size native I wanted in aluminum armature wire and wound green floral wire around this to give the clay something to stick too. Here is a photo of Kong with the native armature in his mouth.