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.