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Painting Frankenstein's Monster in Watercolor

Mar 26, 2024
Well, hello, I didn't see you there, you know, you really shouldn't be here, but since you are, I have something to show you, wait, the teacher is coming, come with me, okay, that's probably enough. Hello everyone and welcome to this little drawing

painting

the devil. I'm drawing and

painting

a portrait of actor Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's

monster

from the 1931 film that was released by Universal Pictures a long time ago, let's see, I'm obviously starting the drawing process here. and trying to find all the different shapes and proportions that make up this kind of side portrait of Boris Karloff here.
painting frankenstein s monster in watercolor
I love these old

monster

movies. I grew up watching it when I was about 5 or 6 years old. My parents let me stay up. On Saturday nights they would make me take a nap and they would wake me up and I would get up and watch those old black and white movies on one of the channels where our station had those old movies on and sometimes it would be something like Laurel and Hardy or a comedy , but a lot of times it was those old Universal monster movies and that's where I fell in love with the quiet movies and I tend to watch a few of them every Halloween season, so Frankenstein is probably one of them. one of my favorites of all here, I'm still working on the portrait, it looks like I needed to fix the chin a bit and as I look back on this, and of course while I was painting, I changed a few. things, but I'm saying proportion issues here that I catch later in the painting and I'll mention them a little later, you know, Frankenstein, the character is actually 200 years old this year, the original novel was published in 1818 if you can believe it ago 200 years old so happy 200th birthday to Frankenstein's monster and everything that comes with it looks like I'm almost done here yeah okay so now I'm going to set up the lab here to do the painting part. thanks Frank, okay this is a bit of a strange place to do this, but I'm going to show off my new little brass pallet from Brass Pallet India.
painting frankenstein s monster in watercolor

More Interesting Facts About,

painting frankenstein s monster in watercolor...

I guess we can think of it as a little mini coffin just for the sake of accompanying it. this video, but this little thing is built like a tank and it opens twice in there, as you can see it has 12 colors inside, like I said, this is from a brass palette from India, it has a removable paint tray that it contains 12 colors and it has this little kind of bar on the side that allows you to hang it from the side of the palette like I show it here, so you can use that medium, well look, that's so cool, it's slipping away from me to show you that you can use the medium. section for mixing if you want, but in this video I'm just using it as is, so I love this little palette, it's a nice little pocket size, using a little bit of acid and embalming fluid for this one.
painting frankenstein s monster in watercolor
It's a joke. The costume that Boris Karloff wore to film Frankenstein actually weighed like 35 pounds, it was a heavy costume and sometimes he had to lie on some kind of support board between takes to help take the weight off each of his boots. I think we weighed about 11 pounds each and were weighted so that he could lean forward unnaturally while walking. I guess Karloff had some back problems. I mean, he was like 43 years old when they filmed Frankenstein. He had some back problems. Yeah and I guess the heavy boots and some kind of suspenders on the costumes and stuff really made his back a lot worse, so here I'm putting a kind of background wash and since I'm working from a black and white photo, No I'll know, I know it doesn't seem like I sped it up a little bit for you. um, I know I'm probably not going to use a lot of bright colors in this one, but I wanted to do it nicely. from a yellow to blue background wash because I knew that a lot of the color in this was going to be a lot of muted greens and things like that, so all the washes that I put on top of this are going to go, you know, like there will be a lot of greens to Karloff's makeup for this Frankenstein movie, it took three and a half hours to put on and two hours to take off, so it took a long time to put the makeup on and take it off, okay?
painting frankenstein s monster in watercolor
What I'm doing here is putting a dark tone along that side of his face. You know, obviously, the profile that they're carving that profile. I really want that line to be sharp. I'll loosen up more as I go, but I really want that line to be sharp, so I'm selecting it carefully and working on the background first and establishing that part of the portrait that Karloff starred in three different Frankenstein films, in the first he played the monster. one was simply titled Frankenstein and then he played the same monstrous character in Bride of Frankenstein and then played the monster again in Son of Frankenstein.
Several other actors went on to play Frankenstein's monster, one of them was actor Bela Lugosi who played Dracula in the first Universal Studios Dracula film and the interesting thing is that he was originally scheduled to play the monster in this first Frankenstein film , but they did some test footage with him and he insisted on creating the look or having a big hand in the look of the character. and some test footage was filmed, but from what I understand, it has been lost. I'm going to go into just the paint here real quick to fill in some of the midtones and figure out where those shadow shapes are going to be.
Anyway, they shot some test footage with Bela Lugosi and from what I understand he looked ridiculous and he did it, he wasn't scary, so director James Whale started looking for another actor to play the role and ended up meeting Boris Karloff. and I asked him to do it and the rest is history. One of the fun things about the Frankenstein makeup is that Boris Karloff had a bridge on the sides, you know where his molars are or were, and he could remove that bridge. dentures to help create the character's sunken cheek look, okay, I left a little bit of red in the background, um, because why don't you know?
It's there, it's a kind of counterpoint to all the green ones that are going to be there. in this it was like a little afterthought to leave that. I think I drop another drop of red in here somewhere just to give the colors a little bit of contrast, I mean, they're not using rich, vivid colors, but I still wanted to keep them away from being pretty monochromatic, so I'm going in here and put some of the dark shadows, areas of dark shadows, trying to figure out some things that I forgot to mention to you. Note that I realized that I drew them on the top of the head too low, so what I did there was set a higher top on his head so that when I go back and paint the dark tones there I will remember that they are his needs . being taller than it actually made it an interesting thing about the movie stable for the public, it was actually a little controversial and scary in the movie and in Kansas they actually banned the movie on the grounds that it showed cruelty and, in quotes, tended to degrade. moral, so yeah, it was a mixed reception in terms of how scary it was for people and whether people felt like a movie should be that scary, you know, it's interesting, it's not scary for today's audiences or necessarily, anymore you know, but in the past. so it was a big deal, they even filmed some kind of dark filler, you know, fixing the chin there and putting those dark values ​​under the chin, but they actually filmed like a little short monologue to put in the beginning of the movie, warned how scary it was, so people were prepared, which I find kind of funny.
Well, I'm just moving those dark glasses around with clean water on the chin to bring out some of those mid tones and this is meant to be a little sloppy, loose painting since it's something I'm doing quickly. One of the other interesting things about this movie is that Karloff Boris Karloff wasn't billed, isn't there a bit? more red to go with the red in the background. um, his billing in the movie in the credits was just a big question mark. It was not considered that way. I think they wanted to have a little bit of mystery there, but they did that little bit too.
They treated him like he was some kind of prop in a way, which is crazy because his performance was brilliant in this movie, but he wasn't even invited to the premiere. The funny thing is that Karloff, you know, was a very distinguished English gentleman. who was well read, well spoken, but he referred to Frankenstein's monster and the character he played is a dear old man, so I found that funny later, Karloff, sorry, Boris Karloff was actually the narrator and the voice of the Grinch in the movie. old dr. Seuss How the Grinch Stole the '60s Christmas Cartoon, so when you hear that narrator talk about the story there, I'm fixing under the chin, there I am when you hear that narrator in that old animated special, that's this one Dude, that's Boris Karloff.
Okay, I'm going to go in and I'm adding some details of the clothing, nothing too specific, it's just there to suggest what's going on in that clothing, a little shadow under the nose, they're trying to find those mid tones, okay , I'm putting kind of a sickly vomit green in there to just add some warmth to some of the face there so it's not so monochromatic blue just add a little punch there now I'm using a lot of Payne's gray in this one so I hope I've left enough Gray Payne for the rest of you. They would like to use Payne's gray, but I'm almost using it as an ink at this point, like I'm inking. some of the darker areas, but it is what it is.
I guess an interesting fact about Frankenstein is that all the lab equipment, all the equipment that produces the Guilt Lightning effect and all that, all the lab material from the first Frankenstein movie was actually used again for Mel Brooks. A sort of parody of the Frankenstein films, Young Frankenstein, which was released in 1974, is another of my favorite films. I love that movie, okay, I'm finding that hair texture there and we know how it works with the necklace. to put some dark shades in the hair without it being just a big black shape or a big dark shade, the water type, I feel like someone is going to ask me the type of water color that I loaded, this little new one that I was going to cut. my video, so I wasted about five or ten minutes here, sorry anyway, like I'm saying the type of paint I use in this palette is Daniel Smith, so now I'm taking the gouache out a little bit of the gouache type white. to go and get some of those reflections in the paint, come and finish it, usually I would probably mask them with a little bit of liquid frisket, those areas, those bright white areas or I would just be more careful, but for the sake of this, I'm reapplying some lime and bringing out those bright white highlights and I'm also using it to fix problems or mistakes on that bright side of her face, you'll see me fix things like her nose and the slope of her forehead, things like that, you can see me actually fixing the tip of his nose there, there's a strong light hitting the actor when they took this photo from the left, so it left kind of a very strong edge of light on that side of his face and I think that bright white It helps to sell realism in painting a little.
Here there was also a not so strong light coming from the right side behind his head and you can see that, so there is a small area of ​​light under his head. Heard there where the light caught it, you know, his jawline, um and then, of course, his ear and stuff back there, a little bit in the hair. I'll make sure his electrode is shiny, well, that's it for this one. Everyone, thank you. A lot to watch and put up with this, so be careful, see you next time, bye.

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