Action Figure Customization: Ranger X

I actually started this project, a follow-up to my first-ever action figure custom action figure Commando X and the second figure in my Fireteam X series/mock toyline, roughly three weeks ago. Like most of my projects (especially of this scope), I usually work on it a little bit at a time. I say this because I don’t want anyone to look at the final results and think, “it took him three weeks for that?” Hobby time has been somewhat limited over the past month or so thanks in no small part to all the overtime hours I’ve been putting in at the (home) office to meet work deadlines and other typical adult stuff. That said, I’m pleased to say that Commando X finally has a fellow cyborg squadmate with whom he can undertake deadly missions…Ranger X!

The name Ranger X comes from my two main inspirations for this build: the Ranger and Air Raider classes from the Earth Defense Force series of video games. I guess I picture him as being both a jetpack droptrooper but also the guy who drives the vehicles (and trust me, I have plans for those further down the line). And like his predecessor Commando X, I used a generic bootleg toy soldier as a base and parts from a still unidentified “build your own Iron Man” set that I bought loose at a garage sale for $1 with a handful of other little plastic greeblies I used to fill in the awkward gaps and give the piece a bit more visual interest. Since this is only my second ever action figure kitbash, I try not to overbuild with these and keep it simple.

If you’ve seen the entries on the Commando X build, you’ll see that that the process is pretty much the same. So I sanded everything down with a nail filer (one of the double sided ones on a flexible foam base), washed in a mixture of water and dish soap, and then cleaned with isopropyl alcohol to get rid of any lingering plastic dust. Though, again because of how cheap the plastic is on the base figure, parts continued flaking off throughout the process. But I was prepared for this and tempered my expectations accordingly. My Fireteam X hypothetical toyline is all about having fun, being creative, practice, and making mistakes and not creating museum quality pieces.

Up next is the part where I melt some thermoplastic crafting beads in hot water and mush them around the pegs on the Iron Man arms to increase the surface area and make them fit inside the torso without slipping or falling out (but also retaining the rotational articulation in the arms/shoulders).

After that, I glued down all the pieces with E6000 (using a toothpick as an applicator) and while it isn’t pictured below, I mixed up some Milliput modeling compound and filled in a few of the gaps in the figure like the seamline under his pelvic area where the two halves of the torso didn’t quite fit together, spread some along the sides, and in one particularly large gap between where I glued the backpack and his actual back. There was also another part that needed filling in with Milliput, and you can probably guess what that is by looking at the picture on the right. But I won’t spell that out for you because there’s no way to for me to say it being misconstrued and inviting all manner of rudeness. Let’s just move on, shall we?

Before priming, I decided I didn’t want to headset mic piece that was molded onto the figure’s head and tried sanding it off with my dremel. I probably thought that at the time I would make try painting a scar over it or try some face paint but in the weeks where I worked on this project off and on, I either forgot or thought better of it. So if you’re wondering why that part of his face looks a bit off, there you go. Pretend it’s like a laser or plasma burn or something, I don’t know. In any event, I blasted it with Rustoleum flat gray primer and let it cure for a couple of days.

And while the figure didn’t feel quite as sticky as Commando X did after the gray primer dried, I still didn’t want to take any chances and dunked him in some baking soda and blew off the excess with compressed air. Like I’ve said before, if you’re working with cheap plastic bootleg figures from China, don’t take any chances or shortcuts when it comes to treating the surface because it’s only going to bite you in the painting stages. I mean, you’ll get bitten no matter what because of the quality of the materials, they just won't bite you as hard.

We’ve now arrived at stage one of the painting process: the basecoat. For his uniform, I wanted to go with a green tinged gray that was somewhat inspired by the unique (and somewhat polarizing) color scheme for the original Transformers Masterpiece Starscream (MP-3). I think I mixed three drops of Reaper brand Mountain Gray with one drop of Naga Green and while it looked decent enough on the palette, it ultimately came out looking like the same army green I used for Commando X. I hemmed and hawed about changing it but like I might have mentioned before in previous projects, I’m always leery about putting too much on any given surface. For every project, I thin down everything on my wet palette with at least one drop of Vallejo thinner medium in addition to using a fairly damp brush (unless when dry brushing, for obvious reasons) which is why this particular phase takes me so long and why it still frustrates me when I take a photograph and there are areas that looks like I just blobbed it on right out of the pot. So I decided to just leave it.

I used Vallejo Calvary brown on the boots and belts/straps, Reaper Pure Black for some of the smaller details, and a mix of Pure Black and Blade Steel for the cybernetic arms and shoulder pads. I painted his visor and the red areas of his helmet and backpack with Citadel Mepheston Red, Dragon White for the white areas of the helmet and backpack (I still haven’t learned my less about white, apparently, and it was still every bit of a pain to get to cover as it was for my bootleg Transformer repaint), and a mix of two drops of Reaper Dragon Blue with one drop of Dragon White for the detailing around the visor and the backpack. For the skin, I used two drops of Vallejo flesh tone with one drop of Reaper Harvest Brown though I would later go back over it with a bit of Citadel Kislev Flesh that I received in the mail prior to the wash stage and was eager to try out Sadly, I never did quite get his nose to fully cover no matter how many times I touched it up, presumably because the cheapo plastic kept falling off. Insert hacky Michael Jackson plastic surgery joke here.

For his grenades, I wanted to go for something similar to what you might see for a plasma grenade in one of the classic XCOM games so I mixed (if I recall correctly) 50/50 Naga Green and Candlelight yellow and tried to paint a yellow stripe over the top but it didn’t really show up. Either way, I thought it gave his molded-on accessories a bit more flair and helped drive the sci-fi theme I wanted to go for here.

I set the project aside for what seemed like two weeks while work consumed my life before I finally got around to finishing the paint job. As I mentioned above, I added some Reikland Fleshshade to the face, which gave me more of the darker, tanned tone I wanted with my initial fleshtone mix. I also did some touchups, mostly on the helmet due to my questionable color choices and backpack areas (as well as where some paint rubbed off on the boots and belts). Okay, looking back I think the backpack looks a little too Buzz Lightyear, even for a 90’s throwback action figure/arcade game homage like my Fireteam X project. But after the uniform color came out looking too similar to Commando X, I really wanted to do something to visually distinguish it from Commando X while also still giving visual cues that the two were still part of the same team. Hence the crazy colors for his helmet and backpack, though I still with I would have went with something that wasn’t white and/or yellow because those colors are such a tremendous pain and almost always drag down my final pieces because of how much effort it takes to get them to cover and how thick they still end up looking no matter how much I thin them down.

Oh and I painted on some camouflage before I applied the wash (Citadel Nuln Oil for the arms and the backpack, Agrax Earthshade for everything else). Instead of just the pants like with Commando X, I did an all-over pattern using a mix of Reaper Desert Sand and Pure White for the lighter layer and two drops of Pure Black with one drop of Naga Green for the darker layer. Though you can’t really tell I applied a camo pattern to his shirt because of all the straps and how judicious I was trying not to get any camo on the areas I’d already painted. My ulterior motive for adding camo to his entire uniform was that camo acts as its own highlights in most cases and I wanted to save myself some dry brushing for the final stage. Call it lazy, call it whatever. I don’t care. After three weeks, this project was getting long in the tooth.

For the yellow and white areas, I wanted to try out a trick I learned from a youtube video and took a damp cotton swab and wiped off the excess wash (unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of that either but trust that it happened shortly after what you see below) and leave just enough in the recesses. It worked not bad, but because of how softly molded a lot of the details are in the Iron Man backpack and how they kind of smooth together into one big piece, there weren’t really a lot of recesses for me to work with here. The trick did, however, work much better on the skin. Everywhere else, I just let the washes sink in to create as much shading as possible.

Time for the home stretch: dry brushing and final detailing. Since dry brushing and highlighting are still areas in which my knowledge is still very much incomplete. I do, however, have some new miniature painting instructional starter kits piled up that will hopefully help me out with this more and it is something I will also try to stress more in future miniature painting since it is arguably the most important step in the painting process. But here, I focused mainly on his arms and his molded-on accessories. For his boots and straps, I mixed one drop of Dragon White with his base color (Calvary Brown) and dry brushed it on. What I liked best about that is how much more his boots popped after I brushed over the laces against the black areas. For his arms, I dry brushed over the high points with Citadel Runefang Steel, which I got with a Warhammer 40k starter paints and tools set (another new acquisition that I hope to use for some of my more involved future projects). I’m glad I went darker with the basecoat because I love how striking the Runefang Steel looks, especially when the light catches it.

The final stage was to add a protective clear coat. Like with Commando X, I used the glossy Krylon Crystal Clear spray but unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there. Whenever I prime or clear coat a figure, I typically sticky tack their feet to the lid of an old vitamin bottle which acts as a turn table so I can spray one side, turn it, spray another side and so on. Then I typically leave it on top of the lid in the cardboard spray-painting containment box to cure. Well, overnight Ranger X tumbled backwards off his lid while the clear coat was still drying, leading to the "battle damage" on his backpack seen below:

Not good. So what I ultimately did was take a tiny model piece from my Bits Box (I think this was one of the extra joints from the Armored Puppet Ryuen model kit), hastily painted it Mephiston Red and superglued it over the problem area. I also dry-brushed some more Runefang Steel over the area of the shoulder pad that also fell victim to Ranger X’s late night spill and touched up the back of his boots with Calvary Brown.

With that out of the way, here’s the two current members of Fireteam X side-by-side for the very first time, Commando X and Ranger X. I’m planning on adding at least two more X troopers to their ranks (as well as an enigmatic enemy faction) as well as potentially some custom vehicles and maybe (just maybe) a weapons pack. So stay tuned for more customs, there are a lot of new things I've picked up on that I've been wanting to try out.