Doppleganger: Fear of the Imitator

This is a sharp left turn from my previous post on dogs, but it has a happy ending.  So hang in with me on this.

Last month, I was dreaming that my puppy was acting strange - almost feral - whenever she was in my peripheral vision.

A vet came to our house and said, "This is not your dog.  It's an imitation.  Right now, the imitator has taken a hold of your dog and she's like a zombie version of her former self.  The only way to get her back is to kill the thing you see before you." 

And he handed me a rock.

I braced myself, sighed, and swung the rock at her head. The blow didn't finish the job. She looked up at me, like she does in the photos my wife takes when she's at her cutest with big pleading eyes.  Except now the side of her skull was lopsided and blood was pouring out of her nose and mouth.

I dispassionately swung the rock again - as if I were performing a task.

And then I woke up... horrified at the dream but moreso at myself.  What the hell was wrong with me?  (And no, I hadn't re-watched The Thing the night before.)

My worst nightmares are always about the imitator.  

And my worst recurring nightmare is right out of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers": someone has clearly been replaced by a copy.  More people start acting strange and I become concerned. Then, everyone I confide in tells me to stop worrying... and here, eat this strange food I've never seen before.  Or drink this cup of milk with a thick mist rolling off the brim.  Or just step in this shadowed back room and relax. Or just close your eyes - we have a surprise for you (no peeking).

I had a string of nightmares like this almost every night during my first trip to Ireland.

I recognize these nightmares are rooted around change and fear of it.  I used to think it was based around the fear that those around you have flipped their moral positions.  Or everyone has started buying into some new hip philosophy that is terribly flawed, one that seeks my own death in a way that everyone else is steadfastly ignorant of.   

While these might be the root for some, I've figured out my nightmares stem from the opposite: I have changed -- or had to change -- and my psyche is straining to catch up.

The first time I pieced it together was all those years ago in Ireland.  During the trip, I became enchanted with the land, the viridity, the people, the stout. Then, the doppelganger nightmares every night. After one rather awful nightmare, I awoke with the clarity that the one who was changing was me, not my surroundings: I had adopted a slight brogue. So I forced myself to stop speaking with the lilt I was so charmed by (and cease what was probably an embarrassing cultural appropriation). I reaffirmed to myself I was a Northeastern American on travel.

The nightmares stopped.

My most recent imitator nightmare definitely revolved around the death of our previous dog, Ammi, and the transition to our new dog.   Ammi's passing left behind a void in our household, and we were lucky to locate a dog that filled it so perfectly.  But I was still struggling with moving on; it was harder on me than I wanted to admit to myself. And my kill-the-fake-puppy nightmare manifested from my lingering numbness, fresh emotional confusion and guilt. 

Numbness over the constant clean up as Ammi slowly lost control of her body and more of her personality. 

Confusion over caring so deeply for a new dog when I still cared so deeply for Ammi.

Guilt over "replacing" her, probably sooner than I was ready to admit to myself. 

Things changed but I was struggling to keep up.   But like most fears, once faced into light, the nightmares dissipate.  Once I realized the root of the issue, I came to peace with the situation.  The nightmares stopped.

So... before I move onto to facing the paint job, I want to clarify a few things

First, Spelling: Malifaux spells their creature doppleganger rather than doppelganger, which comes from the German doppelgänger.

Second, the creature definitely draws for the D&D-ish interpretation of doppelganger - a monster who has supernatural powers to imitate a person - rather than the more innocuous "twin stranger".

Third: the figure itself.  The Malifaux Doppleganger figure can be painted two ways: one as if she's holding a towel, one as if she's grabbing a newly acquired sheet of skin to be added to complete her/its masquerade.  

I've seen many done as a towel, so I chose the latter. The sheet of skin needed something to define it a bit. My inspiration to use veins was Cassandra from the first season of the rebooted Dr. Who series.

Doppleganger Color Scheme

• Skin - Main Base: Heavy Glaze of Reaper Tanned Highlight, Shadow (Wash): Reaper Tanned Skin, Highlights: Reaper Fair Skin
• Muscular Bits -  Main Base: Reaper HD Brilliant Red, Shadow (Wash): Delta Ceramcoat Cinnamon, Highlights: Reaper HD Entrail Pink
• Hair - Base: Thinned Vallejo Black, Shadow (Wash): Vallejo Black
• Red and Blue Veins - Undertone Base: Reaper HD Brilliant Red and FolkArt Solid Blue, Shadow (Wash): Heavy Glaze of Reaper Tanned Highlight
• Viscera - Base: Tamirya Tamiya Clear Red paint, Uhu glue, Vallejo Black (see post from chestofcolors.com)

So I used my standard procedure for painting eyes - which i have learned is to do the eye first.  Disappointingly, the awesome The Craft forums on reapermini.com where I got this idea from has now been taken down.  You can still see ghost references for this method on pinterest.

Anyway, the concept is paint the white of the eye.  Then paint a black dot for the pupil. If you screw up, it's easy to fix because you just start from white again without screwing up a perfectly painted face. 

Then paint everything around the eye in black, slowly making sure you don't nick the white of the eye.  Then paint you skin base coats on the face.

For this figure, I got a deceptively coy, almost anime-like big-eyed expression on the figure.  I was very happy at this point.

Dripping blood would definitely distinguish a sheet of skin from a towel. So I tried a new method I read about from chest of colors. The idea is to make a sticky red "goop" that you pull between areas to get the stringiness of fresh blood.  

Dropped a big wad of the goop and pulled it up to the sheet.  For a first time, I was really proud. Beaming, I showed this off to my wife - who said this looked more like... something else... was shooting from between her legs than it did the sheet dripping.  

Very embarrassed , I took an exacto knife and cut off most of the dried goop. Then applied a method that I've seen for drool that uses fishing line and super glue.  That got a coat of Tamirya Red.  

Big improvement.

In retrospect, this figure would have looked a lot better if I'd done a reddish skin tone as an undercoat, then done the veins and then a heavy glaze work of the base skin tone.