What’s On My Desk – 3/1/22

I have so many works-in-progress going on at the moment that they can’t all fit in one picture, so I’ve taken two pictures of all the projects featured in this week’s What’s On My Desk update—one for resin recasts and the other for my kitbashes/action figure customs. We’ll start with the former:

• Starting from the front, we have the four Robot Heroes Mirage recasts on the left that I mentioned in my previous What’s On My Desk and the DIY Molding Compound article. I’ve primed them with Bulldog adhesion promoter (and sprayed white and gray undercoats on the ones getting a full repaint) and hopefully I’ll get to actually painting them once I’ve cleared up some room on my backlog.
• To their right is the Golden Axe Ax Battler-inspired figurine who I’ve almost finished painting. I’m currently on the touch-ups, dry brushing, and highlighting phase so expect the article on this guy to drop fairly soon.
• Behind Ax Battler are the two other in-progress He-Man Eternia Mini resin recasts. I’m just about done adding detail to the Dino Man and he’ll be prepped for painting pretty soon. Next to the Dino Man is the recast that I know I said I’d turn into a Conan/Vikor-type character but I opted to instead customize him as the mighty Hercules. My design is largely inspired by Lou Ferrigno’s portrayal of the character from the stunningly bad (and Golden Raspberry Award winning) Canon Films Hercules films from the early 1980’s.
• Second row to the back are the three Smooth-On recasts of the Red Hulk figurine and as you can see, I’ve layered on some more sculpted details since the last What’s On My Desk. I also added some resin recasted weapons (taken from my attempts to duplicate He-Man Megaconstrux weapons) as well as some random sprue bits from a set of Stargrave miniates. I’m almost done building up the lion man and the eyepatch tiger man but I still have a few more layers of Green Stuff details to add to the King Grayskull-inspired character.
• Far in the back is a Death Knight that I made from a Smooth-On liquid plastic recast of a Papo Germanic Knight figurine that I made as a test (to see if Smoothcast resin would work with Composimold, which it clearly did). This was meant to be a quickie project (and it still kind of is) but once I started painting it after spraying it with flat black primer, I noticed that some of the details didn’t come out with the level of definition that I’d hoped for, so I stopped painting and sculpted him a new visor/eye-slits with Green Stuff. The horns are sculpted as well. I’ll probably add some more details too before I start painting again.

• In addition to my resin casted customs, I also haven’t forgotten my action figure and miniature customs. On the bottom left is my attempt at a custom Cibernetico miniature (a character I learned about when researching Captain Ray and the South American exclusive DC Super Powers figures for that particular custom project). Another quickie project, I’ll try to wrap it up whenever I get the fine-tipped acrylic paint pens in the mail. I don’t trust myself to paint Cibernetico’s emblem on by freehanding it with a brush, so I’m going to hold off until I get my paint pens.
• To his right is the Final Fantasy Red Mage (with Chocobo sidekick) that I started a while back as a companion piece to my custom Black Mage miniature. I’m sculpting its details in conjunction with the aforementioned resin recast figures so I’m finally starting to make progress on this piece.
• Then there’s the ever-present Ninja Hunter who I painted the base colors on but I need to sand down some of the rough surfaces (thanks largely to a mishap involving his worbla belt and too much superglue) and touch up the basecoat. Again, this is one I’m working on a little bit at a time whenever I actually remember that it’s a thing that exists. But like I said in the last update, it’ll get there (eventually).
• Next to him is another action figure custom that I’ve been chipping away at (albeit very, very slowly) is a John Cena figure that I found for $1 at a thrift store. I’m planning on turning him into a 90’s comic book-style commando character (hence the special forces beret I sculpted for him out of Green Stuff). The next thing I’m going to do whenever I circle back to this project is to give him a bandolier, turn his jorts into fatigue pants, and add a belt with some other clothing-related details (likely using worbla). I don’t plan on fully repainting the skin, though I am going to add some warpaint and body-camo. Again, I'll probably just gradually pick away at this one until I've cleared up some space on my project backlog.

In addition to all of the above-mentioned projects, I’m also planning to put out the first of what I hope will be many more installments in my Random Resin Recasts series. So stay tuned for that.

All of that said, I want to make more of an effort to focus on my long-neglected novel project starting this month. And I want to catch up on my reading too, since I’m still 5 books behind on my goodreads goal as of this writing. Unfortunately, this will likely cut into my crafting time (since there’s unfortunately only so many hours in the day for hobbies) though I still plan to close out at least four of my ongoing projects this month to meet my self-imposed blogging goal of posting at least one new article per week. While I don’t talk about it on the blog as much as my other hobbies, my writing goals are still important to me.

And now that I’ve more or less recovered from some of my work-related writing burnout (churning out thousands of pages worth of technical manuals in the span of a couple weeks has that effect on me), I hope that this month is the month where I can finally wrap up the last 43% of my novel Primeval Frontier and make a post telling readers where they can read it online.