Outpost 206

I’ve been enjoying the Legend of Mana remaster that was released last summer. It was one of my favorite PS1 games and boasted the most gorgeous 2D graphics I’d ever seen up until that point. When revisiting the game over 20 years later, I was delighted to find that the gameplay still held up (which sadly can’t be said about a lot of the JRPGs from that era that I so enjoyed in my childhood). In my latest play through, I found that I had an even greater appreciation for the game’s unique character designs and I became quite enamored with the character of Larc the Dragoon and his questline. A half-werewolf, half-dragon (who briefly turned into a centaur…yeah) beast warrior would make for an excellent custom miniature and digging through my cigar box full of unpainted miniatures, it didn’t take me long to find a starting point. Using a 54mm Tehnolog werewolf as a base, I snipped the hands and tail from a random soft plastic Godzilla figurine that I had lying around and transplanted

Dollar Tree’s Final Faction action figures are only a dollar (or $1.25 or whatever they raise their prices to if you're reading this in the future) and make for excellent customization fodder, so it stands to reason that I still have quite a few of them in my bits bin. This project is a follow-up to my previous action figure customization project involving Final Faction figures, this time going for a military science fiction theme involving mercenaries on a desert planet. Hence the name. This project is one that I was originally going to post as individual entries, but I ultimately held off on doing the write-up for the first figure until I finished the second one. So lucky you, here’s a Final Faction customs two-in-one. The first one, who I’m tentatively calling the Desert Planet Mercenary Contractor, was already made from parts leftover from my  Corporate Security Android build . If you’re keeping score at home, that’s Steel’s head, torso, and right arm, Steadfast’s left arm

 This project made me realize something about why I have so many concurrent projects at once and the rate with which I knock them out. The stuff that I extensively plan for seems to take me forever to complete and will sit around in my works-in-progress pile for months while the projects that are completely off-the-cuff (like this one), I tend to knock out in a weekend or less. I’m not entirely sure what that says about me and the way I self-motivate. At any rate, here’s that He-Man from the Eternia Minis line that I recasted in sapphire blue epoxy resin as part of a crafting experiment involving silicone mold-making. After filling in all the craters caused by air bubbles with Green Stuff, I replaced his hands which suffered the worst of the air bubble-related damage. Since the sapphire blue casting was my second one, I knew the hands would give me trouble so I had a contingency plan already in place. I sawed the hands off and swapped them out with some spares that I created from