My baby sister presented me with this challenge. Take this one-piece cast statuette mimicking marble, and bring him to life -- so to speak -- with paint. 

Red hair and brown eyes, if you please. The eyes would be a small problem in that whoever copied this guy from the ancient original, chose to animate his some with sculpted suggestions of irises and pupils. Like most, if not all sculpted humans, the original had smooth and featureless eyeballs. 
I filled his as best I could with 5-minute epoxy. Sadly I couldn't do much about their lack of symmetry 
It took about two hours to fill and clean up mold marks, fill in pinholes and generally get him as smooth as possible. I don't know what kind of material he is cast in. There was definite evidence that someone took some kind of a sanding/grinding wheel to where there were rough spots or maybe some flash. It also looked to me that his chin was repaired with some not quite matching filler that needed more smoothing than it got.
The first step was to establish a proper pale skin tone consistent with red hair. This is the first coat, a test coat. Against a blue background, maybe. Against a white background he was definitely too dark.
This layer did serve as an excellent primer coat, revealing a whole bunch more rough spots and lumps and bumps. 
Whatever the material he's made of is, it filled well with Bondo spot putty. 
The base paint I used was Testor 1170 -- flat light tan. To get the degree of paleness I was after for the upper skin shade, I mixed it about one part tan to three parts flat white. I then mixed two more darker shades of the same for lower skin and shadows. I'd also end up using the straight 1170 for deep undercuts. Time to crank up the compressor and start to airbrush.
Probably the biggest misstep came when I did his hair. My idea was to lay in all the shadows in dark brown and then brush the orange on top of that. Unfortunately I didn't appreciate the orange's lack of covering power and it was quickly evident plan A would not work. And of course I'd started work on his face.
Here his face is wrapped in Parafilm to protect it from orange over spray. The paint was Testor orange in the little 1/4 ounce jar. Highlights were done with a little yellow mixed in and shadows were just brown. 
This is his face at an early stage. Shading done with artist's oils. The oils were only really effective on his face, fingers and toes. The bulk of the shading was done with the airbrush. There's a hole yet to fill on the tip of his nose. 
The fact that he was cast as one with his shield, painting that item would prove to be tricky. Also, with the original ancient guy, the sculpture gave him the broken sword, scabbard and what is clearly a belt strewn under his right side. With this copy, instead of the belt, there's what I can only recognize as, what, shreds of torn fabric? What's that doing there? I have no idea.
Ready to deliver. Less the paint and palettes, of course. 


I read someplace that his wound suggests a sword stab through his ribs and into his right lung. In the real world there would be blood all over the place and probably bubbling down his chin as well. Much easier to paint only what which was molded on him.



Well that was a step out of the old comfort zone.
https://www.designtoscano.com/products/dying-gaul-sculpture-pd1948
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Gaul
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