Adam Warlock

Now this was a difficult one. I had very little information to work with to make this figure. Adam Warlock has been around for years, but he is always reincarnated in a different form. He's just recently been reincarnated and there are only a couple of images of him out there. He first was just a naked gold guy, then he just had a plain black costume on.
However, on the cover of a couple of comics he has a more elaborate costume on. I thought I'd try to do this one, but had very little information to work with.




















I can't say I'm entirely happy with the outcome, but I'm going to try and do a base for him. We'll see if that can bring some learning.

Baby's First Auction

I've put Drax up for auction on eBay. It's all very exciting.

Click here to go to my auction.

And now we play the waiting game...

eBay

I'm trying to organise selling some of my customs over eBay. It's the first time I've sold things there, so it's a little daunting and complicated for me.

There is a group called C.A.S.E. (Customiser Auction Sales on eBay)
This seems to be a group of custom auctioners who link to each other's auctions and promote each other. It seems like a good way to see what's out there and to increase traffic to auctions.

To join, I'll need to get an auction up and running then give them an email.

Update: I've made it into C.A.S.E. and there's a link to their page at the bottom of this blog.

Finished Wraith

Here is the finished Wraith custom. I'm very happy with the results. Check the Wrait folder in my custom gallery for more pics of him.

Recognition

As I mentioned before, I have been posting my figures on a site called TheFwoosh.

They have a feature where they highlight the best customs put up on the forum that week.

My Moondragon was their featured custom of the week, so I'm delighted with that.

Now, I may consider putting her up on ebay, but I'm not sure how to work that at all. I may give it a try with a lesser custom, like Drax first of all.

http://www.thefwoosh.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=831&Itemid=1

WIP (Wraith in Progress)

This is the figure that I started with. £2.99 out of Poundstretchers! Bargain.

Anyway, this is Iceman. I chose this figure as he is more or less a total blank slate. He has not emblems on him or clothing. He's just a basic body.

Now, there were a couple of problems with this.

1) I wasn't too happy with his hands. He has a strange pointing finger on one hand.

2) The balls that make his shoulders are good for posing the figure but they stick out too far. If I was to drape Wraith's poncho over them it would look like he had shoulder pads.









The first thing I do with most figures is to paint it a random colour. I chose a dark blue for no good reason. I find that by painting it, I wipe the slate clean. It is no longer Iceman. It's just a blue figure.

You can aslo see in this picture that I took the hands from another figure and used them to replace this figure's.

The replacement hands have individual finger articulation, which is something I love.






Not really a good picture to see it in, but I took the arms off at the shoulder and then drilled holes further down the torso and fixed the arms there.


This got rid of his bulgy shoulders.

I also sanded down his neck muscles.



































The head can really make or break a figure. Iceman had a pretty decent face on him, so I didn't change too much. Most of Wraith's face is more in the lighting than anything else. His eyes are mostly in shadow and he doesn't have any facial points of interest.

This was the first time I had tried to sculpt this amount of hair. Wraith's hair is long which is always a problem with figures. If it hangs straight down then it stops the head from turning when the hair hits the shoulders. I swept his hair back here, and tidied it up a little to keep the head movement.

I would have liked to have had more single strands hanging around and a longer top-knot but the modelling material gets very brittle when it's too thin.



























Now, the poncho. This was a nightmare to make a decision on. Ponchos hand over the shoulders and around the body, which would be no good on an action figure. He wouldn't be able to move from the elbow up. So I decided to go with more of a bib and cape look. I was hoping to make it look like the sides of the poncho had been slung over his shoulders, but I'm not too sure I managed to capture that.


Now, this is a tricky part. Iceman had these blank feet. I say blank because he didn't have toes sculpted, nor did he have any kind of shoe. It was just blank.
It's usually quite tough to get a picture of characters' feet, but as Wraith is a space cowboy I imagine he would have pointy cowboy shoes with a heel.
I finally got a picture of his feet and saw that there was some material wrapped around the mid point, so I sculpted that too.
Feet are hard because you cannot sculpt too much as the character would easily lose its balance.




And this is pretty much the thing finished before painting starts. You can also see that I added more detail to his bib so that it wouldn't just look like a flat area when it was painted. At the point this photo was taken I still had to finish the banages around his lower legs, and fix his holster and belts.

The holster was a pain. I had to make the gun first then make papier-mache straps to hold it to his leg. I then sculpted more papier-mache around the gun so that it would fit snugly in there.
On top of the papier-mache I then put some clay so that I could sculpt some details into it.

After that I added the belt straps around his body. Again these were a little difficult as they could not limit his poseability.

Wraith

I'm working on a figure of Wraith. He's not really a character that I'm into, but it's interesting to be trying to work on him.

This is his description from Wikipedia:

Wraith (Zak-Del) is a fictional character in the Marvel Comics Universe. His first appearance was in Annihilation Conquest: Wraith #1 in Annihilation Conquest.
The character was created to mimic the sensibility of western movies, especially Sergio Leone's "trilogy" of the movies about the Man with no name played by Clint Eastwood. The character is thrust into a science-fiction story with horror overtones, mixed with themes of DC's Superman, both comic and the movie version. Thus, in a western manner, Wraith's after his family killer, but as with Superman his father was a scientist who saved his son by transporting him to a different part of space at the last minute. Similar to Richard Donner's Superman the movie, Wraith receives spiritual counseling from his long-dead father. Wraith's eventual role seems to mash both the Western and Superman mythologies enabling him as a neutral factor with the reluctant messianic role of deciding the outcome for the region he has come only to find his father's killer in.

Hmm, seems a bit deep. And I don't buy the Superman parallels. Wraith is a space emo gunfighter. I chose to do him because I thought it would be challenging to try and make a character that I'm not too interested in, and that is not the kind of figure I would usually go for.

Wraith has a 'polymorphic' weapon, which means it's basically a gun that can become a sword or a whip or whatever.