bgaesop posted:

Pics?

scare posted:

while i love Strangers in Paradise, i think it'd be cool to have a Katchoo action figure, I think once i did, I'd be waiting the rest of my life for shocker to make a Francine to go with her...

mods rename me posted:

That's some fine nerd rage but I agree. I was gonna get into the new stuff but I missed Greyskull. Now it's just too much for me right now, so I'm dumping my old stuff even.

The Action Man posted:

I've decided that I'm going to start customizing figures. I've begun getting discount figures for spare parts, but I haven't done this before. Where is a good place to learn?

Mapocho posted:

The sculpt on Hellboy is solid geometric cuts, going along with the blocky Mignola style. Looks like the paint job on him is darker tones on the crevices of the sculpt washed/rubbed off. I think your corpse figure is looking great, just needs more of that rough blocky edge, don't paint the profile shadows on let the sculpt do that on its own. I hope this helps.

Jace Madan posted:

Wow that Mega Man is outstanding, that's spot-on for what I would want to see for a live action movie adaptation design. The helmet and face are especially well done, did you sculpt them entirely from scratch or sculpt them on top of something?

Fish Of Doom posted:

I think they're long skinny limbs could be great for some customs.

Xenomrph posted:

Stumbled across this pic on the Spawn.com toy boards:



It's a Superman figure repainted to look like 2D comic book art. I think it's a pretty cool effect. Apparently it was done by "frogDNA" over at Procustomizers.

Fish Of Doom posted:

I was inspired by this and attempted to make an Animated Series Batman.

stupid ugly retard posted:

so for 20 bucks they will automatically send you 7 figures, billing you another 20 bucks each time, and they aren't telling you what figures you'll get before you sign up. this is like those book club scams they try to push on elementary school students

Jace Madan posted:

I'm still upset about MOTU 200x, the sculpting was amazing, the figures were fun, and there were so many great characters to get... if you could find them among the "Pimp Daddy" Skeletor and Neon party beachhouse He-man variants. I think had Mattel not killed the line with senseless shortpacking and some other really, really stupid choices it would have lasted a good amount of time.

Joe Fisto posted:

quote:

It's a little tough to explain my working process since it varies like crazy from one project to the next, and I'm pretty bad about ever snapping pictures of unfinished work.

Most of the custom sculpting I do is from various kinds of Sculpey polymer clays... they make a few different types that have different properties, and I'll frequently mix two or three kinds to get the effect I want. They all bake at the same temperature so any combination works.

Sculpey - the regular white stuff. Soft and easy to work with, but bakes extremely brittle. Great for bulking out large areas, horrible for fine detail.

Super Sculpey - the pink stuff. Perfect texture for difficult detail work, but still fairly brittle when baked. It's slightly translucent so I tend to add something to it just so I can see the details more clearly.

Sculpey Premo - much more durable than super sculpey. Comes in little colored blocks... a bit pricey. More elastic/gooey texture, so it's tougher to work with. 90% of the time I use a blend of Super and Premo. 50/50 is fine. More premo makes it more durable, more super sculpey makes it easier to work with. The colors are useful just to get a clearer idea of what you're doing. I.E. I mixed up blue clay to make Mega Man.

Sculpey Flex - makes rubbery, flexible forms. Great for making really thin, fragile details. It's like trying to sculpt with toothpaste, though, and mixing it with other types can impact its usefulness. File under "advanced."

This stuff all bakes at a low enough temperature that it's usually possible to bake it right onto a store-bought figure, but you always run the risk of warping or melting the thing so it's best to avoid it where you can. Cheap figures with hollow torsos are especially prone to this, so the first thing I do is try to pop the figure apart at its various joints so arms, legs and heads can be baked separately. (You can do this by preheating the oven to like 150 degrees and putting the figure in there for five minutes. The plastic softens enough to pop apart at the joints, but it's not hot enough to cause any damage.)

For Mega Man, I wanted him to have slightly cartoonier proportions than Iron Man, so I made his hands, feet and head bigger.

One hand got replaced by the buster arm. It was sculpted and baked totally separately. I chopped off his left hand, drilled a little hole in the stump just big enough to put a bit of bamboo skewer in there, then put a rough blob of sculpey over the skewer, pulled it off the arm and baked it, and that was my armature. I built up the cannon in many layers, just checking occasionally to make sure it looked good on his arm. Once it was all finished I krazy-glued it in place.

The other hand I borrowed from another toy. I kept the wrist joint from Iron Man but removed his hand just below it with an x-acto knife, then chopped the hand off the other figure and glued it carefully in place. I then had to make his wrist fatter. To get that overlapping armor look I built it up with thin cardboard first - glued in place - and then sculpted over that. I also added some bulk to his ankles, which took a while because I had to worry about symmetry as well as matching the style of the armor.

I always do the head last, because it's the most fun and the most challenging. Getting the proportions right and getting the attitude right are crucial, so it helps to have the body done first. For Mega Man's head, I used Iron Man's head as the "skull." I started by adding big round eyes to Iron Man's head, baked that, then sculpted the face around them, baked that, then sculpted the helmet in sections. I used a lot of real helmets for design inspiration. Google Image Search is your best friend!

It takes a lot of patience to do mechanical shapes, and usually you'll want to do a lot of fine sanding and carving after it's baked so that everything is nice and smooth.

The paint job on that guy took a very long time. I use acrylic model paint, various brands, but it's incredibly important to put layers of paint on very thin! This is where the majority of people gently caress up their hard work. You don't want any drips or brush strokes to show on something this small. There are no shortcuts. Be patient. If one thin coat of paint doesn't cover it perfectly, let it dry and add another.

Start with darker colors, then once you have a decent base coat you can gradually dry-brush lighter shades over it until it looks good. This will bring out details really nicely. Start with larger areas and work your way to finer details.

When I want really vibrant colors, I sometimes mix some fluorescent paint in there. I added a little day-glo green to the lighter blue on Mega Man. I always mix silver in with the eye color to get some lifelike sparkle in there. Eyes are really tough to paint. Sometimes it takes a few tries.

Remember that to be good at this stuff takes years of practice and an ability to improvise. A lot of customizers out there put up detailed tutorials, and you can steal ideas from everywhere, but the real trick is patience and skill and imagination.

Don't be afraid to just try new poo poo and see what happens. If it doesn't work, try something else. Practice on old toys you don't want anymore and stuff you dig out of bargain bins. It's about having fun, so just experiment.

Good luck!

WaynesWorldGirl posted:

That looks fun, it's too bad they made Lion-O a kid, though. When will TV execs ever realize that boys like to fantasize about being men, not teenagers.

Ka0 posted:

I'm testing out my newly built ghetto-style lightbox, so I picked up a MU Punisher, which was on clearance to a ridiculous degree. I noticed the figure itself wasn't bad, but I can see if I had spent a good amount of cash on Legends I would be upset or whatever:



My local newstand is jampacked full of replica cars, planes and bikes so I picked this little thing here and I think it made an improvement: