Action Figure Customization - Flesh Golem

As I mentioned in last week’s What’s On My Desk update, this Flesh Golem is the first of three spooky season builds and I was absolutely thrilled to get this project wrapped up earlier in the week. Like my Orc Warrior custom, this was another sculpting-heavy build though there were some minor kitbashing elements involved. It also gave me the opportunity to use some of my cache of crafting beads that I amassed at various garage sales and Goodwills in the early part of the year and haven’t really done much with aside from my two early attempts at bead bots.

My starting point was a Molten Man figure from the Spider-Man Far from Home movie line that I picked up on clearance for about $6 if memory serves. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it initially, but at some point, I looked at its texture and came up with the idea that it would make for a really great undead flesh-monster, like Gerogero from Final Fantasy VIII or a Faceless from XCOM 2 (my two main inspirations for this custom, with a little bit of Resident Evil influence thrown in).

I started off by removing his missile accessory (curiously, there’s no spring-loaded firing mechanism that I could find even though it really seems like there should have been) and sawing off his awkwardly placed hand, which was positioned below his non-firing missile. After that, I took my pair of snips and a sanding block and cut off all the metal bars and chains that were protruding from the figure. Before going any further, I dremeled down the ball joints in the arms/shoulders and used a hobby knife to trim up the sockets to avoid any future paint rub down the line. Lord knows I’ve had my struggles with that.

Since the figure is mostly hollow, it was easy to dremel out a massive gaping cavity in the torso. I swapped the head with that of a Dollar Tree plastic skeleton decoration and cut out some ribs from that same skeleton and glued those on as well. I glued the head on at an bent angle to give it more of a shambling, zombielike appearance. One of the skeleton’s eyes had a hole in its socket, so I filled it with a tiny plastic bead.

Using some milliput, I made the first of what would be several large, fleshy masses to add the major details and help blend the figure’s kitbashed elements in with the rest of the body type. Once fully painted, this figure’s bulging neck sculpt stood out as one of its most striking details (at least it was to me anyways). I also used some milliput to reinforce the skeleton ribs, since as one can probably imagine, the Dollar Tree plastic was a bit flimsy and needed something other than superglue to hold them in place.

I knew I wanted to fill the cavity I made in the torso with all manner of guts and gore, so I started randomly gluing different sized beads together and covering them in milliput to make vaguely organ-shaped objects to pair up with my centerpiece, a length of intestine that I made by stringing together the smallest plastic beads I had along a piece of 1 mm armature wire (and capping it off with the end of a q-tip). For the intestines, I focused mainly on filling in the gaps between the beads with milliput rather than trying to coat the beads themselves.

The plan from the beginning was to give the Flesh Golem a massive, clublike arm and to do that, I capped off the hole in his elbow with milliput and inserted another piece of armature wire into the hole where his missile accessory used to fit. Then I took two of my larger wooden beads (an oval one for his forearm and a spherical one for his fist) and strung those along the wire before super gluing them in place to form the basic shape of the arm.

For his opposite leg, I sculpted him a club foot to go with his club arm, adding some texture to it with my metal and silicon sculpting tools. I was originally planning to give him a massive, elephantine leg but I decided against it once I actually started sculpting. Going any larger might have unbalanced the figure and made it harder to stand up and like with all my customs, I always aim to make them retain as much functionality as action figures as I can despite my modifications.

After the leg was all done, I sculpted over the wooden beads of the arm, again using my silicon and metal sculpting tools to create texture and periodically dampening the surface with water to smooth out the surface.

The penultimate step in the building stage was to stuff the hole I made in the torso with entrails. Though I made a few different sized organs, I knew only one would fit after placing the intestines and I eventually found the right one after some dry-fits and a bit of trial and error. After supergluing them in place, I applied some E6000 on the tip of a toothpick to fill in any gaps with transparent goop.

For the claws on the hands, I cut up the Dollar Tree skeleton’s arm and leg bones. After gluing them in place, I molded around the “roots” with some small globs of milliput and blended them in with my sculpting tools. I more or less did the same with the claws on the foot, only I used the claws from a random SD Gundam model piece I had in my bits box.

Before priming the figure, I added a last minute detail to his back, which I thought looked a little too plain. Taking his original Molten Man head, I glued it to his back (like a giant, tumorous pustule) and covered its facial figures with milliput.

I primed the figure first with Bulldog adhesion promoter and once it was dry, I covered it with a coat of Rustoleum Flat Black primer. This was my first time priming in black, as until now I primed in either flat gray or just painted over the original colors after priming with Bulldog (which is clear) and I wanted to retain some of the automatic shading that comes with a black primer, hence why I didn’t try too terribly hard to cover every nook and cranny with my basecoat.

For the basecoat, I used Citadel Bugman’s Glow, which stood out to me from my paint rack because of its reddish hue, like livid flesh or raw musculature that would make a solid platform to layer on progressively lighter fleshtones. For the organs and a few other details, I brushed on some Citadel Blood for the Blood God technical paint (which I would apply several more coats as I continued painting).

What was really fun about this project is that it didn’t follow my typical painting stratagem (i.e. first basecoat, then wash, then dry-brush). Instead of the usual linear path, I alternated between applying different dry-brush layers and washes to blend them in, and going back and forth between the wash and the dry-brushing throughout the process until I was eventually satisfied with how it looked. Also, I think I stumbled on a hack for painting eyes after watching some a youtube video purporting that it isn’t so much the size of the brush head but rather, how fine its point. So I just dipped the tip of a fine-pointed silicon sculpting tool and just dabbed it onto the eye and it worked surprisingly well.

Here’s the lists of paints used:

• Basecoat Flesh Tone – Citadel Bugman’s Glow
• Flesh Tone (Second Layer) – Citadel Kislev Flesh
• Flesh Tone (Lightest Layer/Highlight) – Vallejo Flesh Tone
• Wash – Vallejo Flesh Wash, Agrax Earthshade (on teeth, claws, and ribs)
• Entrails – Citadel Blood for the Blood God and a mix of Citadel Mephiston Red and Vallejo White (to create a pink to dry brush over the intestine)
• Ribs and teeth – Vallejo White
• Eye and Socket –Abbadon Black and Yriel Yellow (Pupil)

Last up was the protective clearcoat. Since I wanted a kind of wet, slimy finish for the final product, I decided to go with the gloss clearcoat on this one rather than a matte clearcoat. I was surprised to see that it actually helped bring out the lightest flesh tone layer (the last one I dry-brushed on). The glossy coat really made the lightest elements pop.

I’m thrilled with how well this project came out and I dare say that it’s probably my favorite project that I worked on this month. I definitely want to create more monsters in the future but in the meantime, here’s the obligatory before and after pic (please excuse the crappy lighting in my home office and the fact that my camera phone didn’t want to focus).