Tutorial — Mad Scientist "Brain" Painted Toy

If you know anything about Lee & Pearl™ tutorials, you know that we LOVE to paint inexpensive things, making them look super-deluxe instead.

When we found this hot pink, squishy "brain" squeeze toy in the check out line bins at our local Michaels craft store, we knew that this had to be our next painted project — and the star prop of our Halloween 2017 Mad Scientist Laboratory pictorial.

Now we're going to walk you step-by-step through the process, showing you exactly how we got from there to HERE...

 

We started by pulling out our supply of Jacquard paints, in a variety of colors and finishes, as well as a small foam pouncing brush, a narrow rectangular brush for detail work and some paper towels for blotting.

For the first paint coat, we mixed up a light flesh color using Jacquard Textile paints in White, Goldenrod and Russet.

We applied that flesh tone all over the raised lumps on the brain using the small foam pouncing brush. To keep the paint from running off the raised sections into the crevices between — which we wanted to stay pink — we tapped the brush from time to time on a paper towel to keep it mostly dry.

While the first coat dried, we studied photos of brains on the Internet and noticed that the raised sections also have a fatty, shiny yellow tone. We mixed up a second coat of paint — using the Goldenrod with a shiny Jacquard Lumière Pearl White — and pounced that on as well.

This is definitely on the right track colorwise, but it seems a little too bright and... well, mustardy. We decided to tone it down a bit with another coat of mixed whites — the Lumière Pearl White again, with some Jacquard Neopaque solid white.

Better and better. The shine here is looking particularly good!

This next step is a little tricky, but lots of fun. We pulled out a pair of reds — the Russet again and a Scarlet Red — mixed them up and used a very narrow rectangular brush to JUST BARELY dab the resulting bloody color along the edges in some of the crevices. Creepy, huh?

With dark colors like this, work lightly, keeping your brush nearly dry all the time. It's always easy to add more paint, but kind of pain to paint over once you've added too much.

Once we had the red in place, we took a long look at our work, and at those photos on the internet — and something still wasn't right. Our paint job had all the right colors, but it was still a little too saturated. Honestly, it looked a little too... living.

So we pulled out the Neopaque white again, and mixed in just the tiniest dab of Neopaque black to make a very light grey. Then, using a nearly dry foam dauber, we pounced that light grey here and there over the bright colors underneath.

This final grey coat was a bit of a risk, and under our bright workroom lights, we weren't sure it had worked. But we ran a few test shots with our Mad Scientist Lab lights, and the grey gave just the right amount of corpse-like pallor to the piece.

So we finished up with a nice, glossy varnish and let everything dry while we cleaned our brushes.

That's it folks. We hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and the step-by-step look at our painting process. There's nothing quite like the satisfaction of taking something ordinary and making it extraordinary with a little bit of paint — and a little added imagination.