Action Figure Customization – Green Guardian

When I started this project, I didn’t know whether to customize this DCEU Aquaman figure as either the pagan Green Man deity or the Green Knight of Arthurian legend so I just decided to combine them into a single character and started sketching out rough details from there. I settled on the name “the Green Guardian” because I pictured this character as a kind of forest spirit/champion of the sacred woods (not entirely dissimilar to Swamp Thing, I suppose).

Like a lot of these projects there were a handful of details that I knew I wanted to incorporate right off the bat, namely his vine-like hair/beard/eyebrows, a pair of horns or antlers that resembled tree branches, and flocking on his shoulders and bracers (if you didn’t know, flocking is that fake grass you often see in model trainsets and dioramas). While it is a lot of fun to start a project and just wing it, I find that it works out a lot better in the end if you have at least two or three specific details in mind before you start building. Once these initial major details are laid out, you’ll find that they act as a catalyst for more ideas as your brain starts building on them and organically branching off into additional details, leaving plenty of room for improvisation and discovery in the process.

And every building phase starts with sanding the figure down and washing the it in warm water and dish soap to prepare the surface (the joints in particular) for the eventual painting stage as well as to get rid of any protective coating or mold-release chemicals. After that, I dremeled off the Aquaman fins and scales as well as removed the armor and chest strap with a hobby knife. The belt I didn’t completely remove because I thought it had an almost wooden texture that fit into the overall forest deity motif, though I did slice off the Aquaman insignias.

Testing out some patterns using paper, I took the ones that worked out onto a sheet of worbla. Once the basic garments were in place, I layered on additional details, like the strap around his chest, and the additional cloth layer around the neck. The buckle I used for the strap was from the armor that I removed in the previous step. I knew I would be adding more worbla to his outfit, but at the time, I wanted to take a break and shift over into the sculpting part of the build stage so that I could hammer out the two major details (having decided to leave his shoulder pads and the eventual flocking for last).

Before I started mixing the milliput I would use to do the bulk of my sculpting for this project (in retrospect, I should have gone with the much stronger apoxie sculpt), I used a pin vise to drill a hole in either side of his head to mark the areas where I would affix his horns/antlers. I knew ahead of time that I would leave a little bit of the sculpting wire on each end of the antlers so that they could easily slot into the figure’s head after I was finished sculpting them.

 
Using some 1mm armature wire and some reference photos of various branches and antlers (eventually coming up with a design simple enough for my meagre-at-best skills as a sculptor), I started out with two longer pieces of equal length and began twisting some smaller pieces around them before squashing the “knots” in place with a pair of needle nose pliers. Once the frames were secure, I covered them in milliput and added some lines and creases here and there with silicone sculpting tools to give them a gnarled looking texture for washes to seep into.

I had more than enough milliput leftover to start rolling out some tiny vines that I stuck to the ends of his hair and beard. The vine eyebrows would come later, since I knew that I would be better off sculpting something that small out of Green Stuff.

I affixed his antlers and superglued them in place. Anticipating several “stress points” where the antlers might crack, I coated them in superglue (using a toothpick as an applicator) and sprayed them with kicker. I would later apply some E6000 in much the same way to provide that extra bit of protection from the antlers breaking off but again, I should have just made them with apoxie sculpt but for whatever reason, that just didn’t occur to me at the time (plus I find milliput much easier to work with, so I almost always default to using that whenever I have to sculpt larger details).

I wrapped up the building stage with a worbla crown/headpiece, his bracers and shoulder pads, and some additional “cloth” details for his boots and belt. For his skull codpiece, I’d initially planned to saw the face off of one of my many hard plastic skulls (I bought an entire bag of them). But I decided that it was actually less labor intesive to just press the skull into some Oyumaru Blue Stuff to make a one-piece mold of just the face, fill that mold with Green Stuff, and glue it to the front of his belt once the Green Stuff cured.

Speaking of Green Stuff, that was indeed what I used it to sculpt his vine eyebrows. And with that, the building stage was complete. As stated previously, I would wait until the figure was almost fully painted before I would add the flocking.

Instead of priming the figure in gray or black, I decided to go with a Rustoleum Camo Green primer (last seen on my first paint rack). Imagining this character to be created entirely out of vegetation, I thought it might make for an interesting experiment to paint him only in different shades of green and brown. After priming the figure in green, I let it dry overnight before priming it a second time with clear Bulldog adhesion promoter (as I do with everything I paint now).

Here’s the mix of paints I used for his basecoat. I can’t be too specific because I mixed all of the below in various combinations throughout the painting process, too many combinations for me to possibly remember because again, I was basically free-balling it at this point.

• Vallejo Old Wood
• Citadel Dryad Bark
• Citadel Death World Forest (for the darker green areas, a drop or two of Citadel Abbadon Black was mixed in)
• Reaper Naga Green mixed with Citadel Yriel Yellow (the vines and hair were more Naga Green than Yriel Yellow, his eyes the opposite)

After the basecoat was dry, I applied some washes to every area of the figure. I primarily used Agrax Earthshade to blend everything together, but there was some areas I later went over with Nuln Oil to bring out some additional shading (particularly his torso stitches and belt). I removed the arms and pretty much had to repaint them because there was still a tiny bit of paint rub on the joints and there was some last minute cutting and dremeling to the elbow joints and arm sockets. It seems that no matter how much I sand down and trim up a figure’s joints at the start of a project, paint rub always seems to rear its ugly head at the last minute.

One the paint rub issue was laid to rest, I proceeded to the final stage of the painting process. Using some leftover basecoat mixes that were still on my wet palette (as well as some new combinations of the above lists paints), I dry-brushed over the areas I shaded with the washes as well as did some final touch-ups. I should not that this was my first time using an Army Painter brush that was specifically meant for dry-brushing and I absolutely loved it. It came in a pack of detail brushes I bought a while back and eventually, I think I’m going to plop down for a set of just Army Painter drybrushes in different sizes.

After I was satisfied with the figure’s highlights, it was finally time to add the flocking. This is something I’d never done before, so I decided to do what I saw other people on youtube doing and brush some Mod Podge onto the surfaces I wanted to flock and then just kind of sprinkle the flocking on in layers. I tried mixing some Mod Podge, water, and flock into a condiment cup and seeing if that might make something that would resemble some clumps of moss, but I ended up just making a mess instead. I did, however, attempt to dull down the bright green color of the flocking by stippling on some washes, namely Agrax Earthshade and Athonian Camoshade, and I thought that worked out well enough (not that you can really tell from the pictures).

To finish things off, I sprayed the figure with compressed air to remove any excess flocking (save for a few stubborn strands here and there) and sprayed it with a protective clear coat. And while the figure looks much too shiny in the pics below, it’s worth noting that these were taken when the glossy clearcoat was less than a day old. In my experience, the sheen typically dulls itself down after a few days (especially if I leave it on my windowsill). Not to the point where it’s a full-on matte finish (which I should have used to begin with), but enough to where it doesn’t look quite so shiny.

My questionable choice of clearcoat aside, I am really happy with how this project turned out and I might circle back to it in the near future to maybe give this figure a giant wooden axe and maybe even an elaborate diorama-style base. But for now, here’s a before and after pic of the finished project side-by-side with the base Aquaman figure I randomly picked up at a Goodwill.