In just about every aspect, The Addams Family kicked the pants of The Munsters, except when it came to theme song. The Addams Family has an embarrassing below average theme song if for no other reason than it tries pass off “ooky” as a real word. In contrast, The Munsters has that wonderfully cool yet creepy Transylvanian surf music instrumental. I could listen to stuff like that all day long.
This model of Lily Munster is a cautionary tale. The original modeling comes from an Aurora Models set of the Munsters’ living room recast during the 90’s by Polar Lights. (Incidentally there’s a far FAR cooler model of Lily sculpted by the dearly departed Jim Fawkes of Fairbanx Models. Why, oh why didn’t I buy one of them when I had the chance?) I started with Lily. I lovingly painted and then dry brushed the creases in her dress — the trick with painting highlights on red fabric is to use scarlet because if you simply lighten the base color with white you’ll end up with pink and that’ll just make the fabric look faded. I under painted her necklace with black and touched it with silver to make it look deeply tarnished. I added individual streaks of grey and white to hair and light blue strands to her ball of yarn. I thought she was just about finished…
..Until I looked up some reference material.
Lily’s gown is very very clearly something lightly toned, my guess a baby blue satin. Red was entirely the wrong choice. What’s more, I could have remembered that if I had just stopped to think before I grabbed my brush. I could have stripped the piece and started over, or actually I could have probably just primered the thing and painted on top but in the end, I went out and bought a whole new kit. It only was around $25 or so. I would have been much more upset if it had been one of those $100 resin beauties
She’s not too big (maybe 3 or 4″) or too obtrusive so I keep her around at the corner of my shelf to remind me to double-check that color scheme BEFORE I crack out the brushes.