- Come with me if you want a butterscotch candy
- You kids these days with your smartphones and your hashtags and your polymimetic alloys
- Cyberdyne Corporation warranty, no longer applies
Here's something a little bit different. My painting of an Arnold Schwarzenegger bust circa TERMINATOR GENISYS, sculpted by Tomasz Radziewicz - Polish sculptor known for some of his Witcher 3 statues that were used by CDProjekt Red for the promotion of THE WILD HUNT.
The bust was casted in resin and measures around 4,5 cm (without counting the wooden plinth).
The main goal with the painting was realism of surfaces. Fleshtones that looked lifelike and real. Gore and wounds that looked convincing.
I did however, allow myself two major departures from his on-screen look in GENISYS
The first change was done in regards to his fleshtone. Originally I wanted his skin to be as close to Arnold's look in the movie as I could come. So I armed myself with a whole folder of high-res movie stills and reference photos of Arnold. For a while my desktop looked like some creepy altar to the glory of the "Black Ploughman".
However, after comparing various photos of Arnold showing him both on and off the set, it became clear that despite playing an older Terminator, Schwarzenegger still went through a standard, Holywood procedure of make-up, where they covered up most of the blemishes, discolorations and signs of age on his skin, making his complection much more uniform.
As a result, Arnold's skin in the movie appeard smoother than off the set. Arnold walking around in his daily life definitely looks more his age, which is only appropriate and right for a man who's 70 years old regardless of how many Mr. Olympia titles he once held.
I thought that cleaner movie look wasn't quite right for what this bust was supposed to depict, so as a reference I decided to base the look of an aging Terminator on how Arnold truly aged in real life, instead of the way he was powdered up in the film.
So I've painted a lot of moles and liver spots around his hairline, basing their overall placement on pictures of Arnold I've found around the internet. Unfortunately the end result isn't that much visible in the photos, as much of the skin blemishes ended up covered by blood and dirt. Plus it was quite subtle to begin with (you want him to look old, not decrepit).
The second, bigger change was done in regards to his facial damage.
TERMINATOR GENISYS was a movie made with PG-13 category in mind so it's depiction of violence was largely bloodless and toothless. The facial damaged done to T-800's face during the movie final battle looked relatively sterile. Which is silly considering it's a depiction of someone with half his head ripped off.
So I decided that I would base my painting more on his look from the final battles of Terminator 1,2 and 3, which looked appropriately more gruesome.
Initially I wanted it to look like his face in T1, which was the bloodiest of the three, but after consulting various reference photos of different hollywood prosthetic appliances as well as some rather gruesome real-life facial wounds, I came to the conclusion that even his look in T1 was realistically too clean and subtle for what it was meant to represent.
We are talking about a guy with half his face missing. It would bleed. A LOT. It should look like a mangled car crash. So that's what I set out to do. I wanted there to be a lot of individual details but only visible if you handled the bust up close, as the overall, initial impression of the wound was to be that of a mangled, bloody, chaotic mess.
I've expanded the sculpt a little bit by adding small patches of torn meat on his skull that were done using a fast drying acrylic resin. In the movie his face is ripped off by a punch from "Nano-Connor". I've figured that realistically even if Connor managed to rip his face in one punch, it definitely wouldn't be clean and it would surely leave some bits and pieces still attached to his skull, especially in the crevices of his eye socket.
There are also other details such as the yellow'ish deposits of fat, little rope'y strings of meat streching from point to point on his face wound that I made using acrylic resin or the visible texture of his lower jaw muscle. Unfortunaltely it's all very hard to see in the pictures as any combination of metallic and high-gloss, slimy surfaces is notoriously hard to photograph.
I also decided that his metallic skull should be mostly covered in gore, unlike the films which show a largely clean, metallic surface with just some red bits and pieces here and there. For reasons both of realism and pure looks. I though it would look much, much creepier if there was just a faint, messy suggestion of a metallic skull glinting from underneath all the gore. In some places on the skull I've painted the blood in a web-like pattern, similar to how water and paint looks like when applied on an oily surface, to show how the blood spreads around the clean metal.
In the end, the project turned out to be less about depicting Arnold Schwarzenegger exactly as he looked in a specific moment in the film, and more about making a realistic take on a general subject of what an old T-800 with an aging bio-layer would look like if he'd gotten himself in a heavy scrap.
