Mad Science, 6.9 / SB14!!!

So first...
Pardon everything about this post: the crudeness of the drawing, the lack of color when it desperately needs some to illustrate the idea, but I won't apologize because it's SPRING BREAK!!!

And unlike most college students, I'm on tour with the Purdue Varsity Glee Club in San Franciso! We are performing the whole week so this whole post was brought to you courtesy of my hotel room!

The challenge: Inspired by an old medical device/practice, create the victim experiments performed by a sadistic scientist.


My good friend Julie is a nursing student at Purdue, and loves seeing the works that I do and the conversations on Twitter I have with past and present Face Off-ers. I asked her if she wanted to give me a hand with this challenge, and she was thrilled (and a little morbid, I might add!) She rattled off lists of creepy medical practices, but the one that stood out the most to me was Lobotomy.

My concept: The character we discussed was a prisoner in the Nazi Concentration Camps (Both of us recently took a very emotional trip to Europe and visited the camp, Mauthausen, in Austria). This poor man is only identified by the number tattooed on his forearm, which he has tried to cut off with a razor blade. After being deemed "suicidal" for his self-inflicted wounds, he was taken to be lobotomized by a Nazi doctor. The doctor not only performed the lobotomy, but sedated the prisoner for weeks to continually destroy his frontal lobe until that portion of his brain was gone completely, leaving him with a sunken forehead. The prisoner, now an emotionless shell of a man, reacted negatively to one of the lobotomies and turned on his captor. Using the remaining ice-pick (one was currently in his skull) and hammer, he struck down the doctor and fled the camp, wandering off into the darkness.

The makeup on this character, while not big or overly fictitious, would have to be highly accurate. The sunken forehead would be the most difficult, but creating the proper look for a bruised post-lobotomy eye and a mid-lobotomy eyelid would be crucial. The look of the man should also be highly shriveled from malnutrition in the camp.

A little darker this week, but still a unique challenge! I do want to color him on my Cintiq when I get back to campus though, so keep an eye out for that!