The Wolf Man!

The Wolf Man
Monogram reissue of Aurora model.

Let's see if I can remember this off the top of my head:
"Even a man who's pure of heart, and says his prayers at night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the moon is shining bright."  Something like that, I haven't seen the movie for quite a few years.  

I think every culture has their legend of the beast within, that violent nature that lurks beneath our civilized behavior, ready to spring out under the right conditions. Universal first tried out the werewolf as a movie monster in the 1930's film "Werewolf of London", an effort now largely forgotten. They tried it again in 1941 with "The Wolf Man" (not Wolfman, it's supposed to be two words). Lon Chaney, Jr. played the part of Larry Talbot, and was so good at it he was immediately type cast. Lon Chaney, Sr. was famous in his own day as a feature performer in monster films, and his son certainly carried on the tradition. He did a lot of sequels, and the closeup shot of his changing was state of the art for the time. Can you imagine what he'd think of the special effects we see today?

This one is, for some reason, my least favorite of the classic Aurora monster models. Mostly, I think it's because the Wolf Man should be in the woods, not standing on a pile of rocks. And, the skull and rats are generic monster stuff that really don't do anything for the setting either. That said, it's an easy one to put together. Recreate the texture of the fur on the body after the putty job by scratching lines in with the exacto blade. The only change I made was on the rat that sits behind him, the tail sticks straight out in an unnatural position so I used a little heat and bent it.

The paint job is also simple. For the fur I started with a base of flat black, then followed with a dark brown overall drybrush, then a second lighter brown drybrush on the highlights to bring out the muscles. I used a chocolate brown on the face and gave the skin a satin finish. I used blue on his pants to give it a little color, and kept the rocks in light grey to help balance out all that dark fur.

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