Ronnie Tucker

Having bought and received my Freddy Krueger model kit, it was time to assemble it.

By the way: you can click any of the images on this page to view larger images.

Above (left) are the various parts of the kit, thankfully my Pinhead (Hellraiser) kit has less parts, and above right is a detailed photo of the head. The kit is made from a plasticy substance and getting the parts to fit together was quite a challenge, especially the torso and legs. I ended up having to squeeze the hips together (folding in a piece at the back) to have the torso overlap the legs. This left me with a dent in the back of the model. I padded the dent with paper and covered it with two-part plumbers putty (great stuff!). Below is the built kit.

First step is to undercoat the model with white paint. While that’s drying - it’s time to start researching colours and so on. This is quite difficult with Freddy, since there was about six or seven films each one having slightly different colours and make-up for Freddy. One thing I did notice: see in the photo above, you can see horizontal lines going across his chest to signify the bands of colour on his jumper? Well those bands don’t continue on to the arms of the jumper. I was about to draw the bands on the arms (with a pencil) but after some research I found that in the original Nightmare on Elm Street film, Freddy’s jumper didn’t have bands of colour on the arms, so this model must be based on the original Freddy design. So I’m going that that.

Time for some base colours, I’m using System3 Acrylic paint:

I’ve left the shoes unpainted as I am using them to hold the model steady on my make-shift base. Next I applied a wash of darker skin tone to the face. A wash is just watery paint but be sure to have a tissue at the ready in case the paint begins to run and also to dab up excess paint. The idea of the wash is to make the detail stand out more.

Now we can see the indented and raised parts of the head. Time to add some more detail to the head and face since the face is what most people will look at first.

With the eyeballs, teeth and mouth painted Freddy comes to life. It really is amazing how just a few blobs of paint can change a model from being pretty lifeless to lifelike.

Next it’s time to add some dirt and shadow washes to the jumper:

The shadow wash is most noticeable on the neck and bottom of the jumper.

Time to move on to the glove. Freddy’s glove is a dark brown which, for reasons unknown, has the palm ripped from it. On the back is a metal plate which the metal finders are attached to. The best way to do metal is to undercoat it with black first, then dry brush the metallic paint over it.

The metallic paint I had was supposedly ‘bronze’ but it wasn’t brown enough for my liking so I added some brown to it. It didn’t affect the metallic properties of it so it worked well. To dry brush, you put paint on your brush, like you normally would, but then - using a tissue - you clean most of the paint off the brush. The idea being that the little you have left will land on the raised areas leaving the indented areas black which gives you a really nice worn metal look.

Moving back to Freddy’s face, it’s time to give him a bit of colour and paint a red wash (not too watery) on to the indented parts of the face that are for exposed muscle tissue.

I’ve also dry brushed some pale skin colour on to the raised areas of the head and face. Also did some dry brush highlights to the trousers to highlight creases, pockets and knee areas. One last thing to do is the claws for the glove. Again, paint them black then dry brush some metallic paint on them. Apart from adding some varnish to the exposed muscle tissue and eyes he’s basically done!

Oh, and I also painted the shoes, and you thought I’d forgotten them? No no… 

To finish it off, I’m going to build a nice hollow wooden base for it. On the front of the base I’ll paint the Nightmare on Elm Street logo and inside the base I plan on putting a battery operated torch, the idea being to point the torch up at Freddy to give it some spooky lighting.

If you found this article interesting then check out my Pinhead (Hellraiser) model kit article…

UPDATE: I have (finally!) built a nice wooden base for the Freddy model and have him mounted on the wall.

The base is made from a 3ft long piece of framing which was cut with a mitre saw at 45′ angles. This effectively gives you a picture frame with only three sides in place, the four side being open. A flat piece of hardboard is also used for the platform. The three sides, and the platform, are stained with a nice dark brown. When dry the movie logo was painted on the front using silver acrylic paint then the three sided frame was screwed to the wall using a small angle bracked on each inner side. The model is then mounted to the platform, and put in place.