Process

After 12-ish years, I can look at this head sculpt and still be really proud of it - but I still see its flaws. The head was too small at the crown, the jaw was to long and large, the lips were a little too big, etc. The first step I took was to fix the sculpt and make it look closer to Paul Pope’s artwork. I used the same brand of epoxy putty - Magic Sculpt - for my reworked head sculpt.

After getting the head done, I jumped right into sculpting the hands. I started with a wire armature, and sculpted multiple sets of hands with Magic Sculpt. There’s really nothing special about it. I also sculpted the belt pouches and tools from Magic Sculpt. Once all of the parts were finished, I made molds of them with Mold Star 16 and casted the pieces using Smooth Cast 300. After having those parts ready, I realized that the 3A body that I like to use looked a little scrawny compared to Paul Pope’s art, so I used more Magic Sculpt to bulk it up a bit.

Making the boots proved to be the most challenging part of the whole figure - I wanted the boots to look real, so I had to figure out how to do the laces, eyelets, and rubber heels and toes while employing a similar method that I used to make the boots of my Kamen Rider figure. I started by making the soles from strips of styrene sheet and plastic cement. Once the basic shape of the soles were good, I took a tiny Olfa hobby saw and made the boot sole ridges, then bent the plastic soles into the shape of actual boot soles (there’s a slight curve at the toe of nearly all boots). One the soles were done, I sculpted the feet with the heels and toes - my idea was to cover the “foot” with the sewn and laced boot made from faux leather, glue it all together, then cut off the excess faux leather right at the edges of the sole, toe, and heel. This actually worked much better than I expected it would, and I think the results are almost perfect!

But I really can’t skip over the really difficult part of the boots - gluing those freakin’ eyelets in! I actually found these weird dollhouse electrical plug eyelets that looked about the right scale, so I ordered a bunch of them. I had to cut the ends off of each one, make a hole in the faux leather, then glue each eyelet in place. I have zero desire to do that again.

The sewing process was thankfully a lot more straight forward! By this point, I learned a little more about sewing and making patterns so the outfit is sewn together using a running back stitch with a much better pattern than my previous Batman figure. The grey body suit is actually made from cotton blend t-shirt material dyed a very light grey. The belt was made in a similar way as the belt on my previous Batman figure, just with more detail and a realistic brass buckle (I can’t believe that I’m still using the leather from that old wallet). Sewing the shoulder covering was a little more tedious, mainly because all of the faux leather pieces were super tiny and I had to stitch them together using my big dumb hands. I think I pulled it off though!

The painting process didn’t present too many challenges - I’m really getting into the zone with painting, and it’s easily my favorite part of the process! I wanted to try and improve on creating more realistic skin tones and creating a weathered look to the leather. I may have gone a little overboard on the leather dry brushing, but I wanted to imitate the texture that Paul Pope had illustrated.

Conclusion

This is easily one of my favorite figures - it technically took me 15 years to make it, so I guess it had better be! Like I mentioned earlier I’m probably going to redo the base a bit, but there isn’t anything on the figure itself that I would change. Also, I’ll probably NEVER put this figure for sale. Sorry!