A somewhat more unusual painting project was Marv from the film or comic Sin City. At least among my readers presumably all know the film and know that he, like the template is staged in black and white. Only a few color accents are set (blood, a red dress, lipstick). By the way, this was already the case in the original. The film is more or less a 1 to 1 transfer of the comic, many of the images are taken directly from the original. Several comic volumes were interwoven to knit a, from my point of view, very well working plot. If you haven’t seen the movie, you should at least watch the trailer:
I think Sin City still looks fantastically good today. The look was unique and of course has often been tried to copy. Sin City writer and cartoonist Frank Miller was co-director, by the way, which is why a true-to-the-works conversion is not surprising. Shortly thereafter, Miller attempted to film The Spirit himself as director, for which he chose the same cinematic means. Unfortunately, that went down the drain.
Mickey Rourke celebrated a furious comeback in 2005 with the embodiment of the character Marv, even if he himself was difficult to recognize. The performance remained impressive in my memory – in general I liked the film very much and Rourke’s performance had a good share in it. There is a miniature of Hasslefree, which is supposed to or can unmistakably represent Marv. It has an optional head and hand that can be used to turn Marv into Hellboy in no time. Actually a very nice idea, which also enjoyed great popularity a few years ago. Of course, I bought the miniature and assembled it as Marv.
I can very well imagine converting other Sin City characters as well, to my knowledge there are no other matching miniatures.
It was clear to me that I also wanted to paint Marv in black and white or shades of gray. Possibly with contrasting blood effect. When on Instagram recently a user called for a painting challenge on this very topic, it was, as so often, the best reason to finally give Marv color. No sooner said than done. I’m pretty happy with the result. I did not use red contrast, because I was worried that it could visually overload the figure. If I look at the photo so, then it probably would not have hurt yet, so that it now looks not only like a black and white photograph.
If you want to see the other posts in the competition, you can check them out on Instagram under the hashtag #greyscaledare.