Custom Action Figure - Ninja Hunter Cyborg

So this project has been sitting in my “finish eventually” pile since at least October (it’s popped up in quite a few of my What’s On My Desk updates since then), though I finally got around to finish it about a month or two back. Don’t get it twisted, I haven’t been consistently working on this project since October of last year (the end result should be proof enough of that) but something I more or less just built on a tiny bit at a time while I was working on other projects before setting aside and almost forgetting about.

With that said, I started off with a cheap Batman from Mattel’s six-inch budget line of DC figures (which I think came out just prior to Mattel losing the license to Spin Master). My plan here was to create a ninja character with robot parts, heavily inspired by the look and overall design of the character Yaiba Kamikaze from the game Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. And much like Yaiba from the game, I’m imagining by “original” character is also a ninja (as well as a cyborg) that hunts other ninja and is aided in his mission by his cybernetic implants.

I swapped out the Batman head with a Nightwing head from that same six-inch budget line since I knew it would better fit the character design that I had in mind. So I put the Batman head on the Nightwing body and stuffed it back into my bits bin for later use (whatever that use might eventually be).

After a good bit of sanding and dremeling out the eye for an eventual bionic replacement, I used a fine-tipped sharpie to roughly sketch out where I would add a mask and other greeblies to the face.

For the first leg of the kitbashing phase, I swapped out one of his hands with a spare from a Getter Robo model kit and glued some other spare model pieces to the figure to give his face and his arm a more robotic appearance.

Then I made his mask and shinobi shozoku using worbla, first tracing various patterns onto paper to test out how they would fit on the figure before committing to them. After some trial and error, I traced the patterns that I thought worked best onto the sheet of worbla thermoplastic, cut them out, heated them up with my heat gun, and affixed them to the figure. To make things easy on me, the shinobi shozoku was done in two pieces: front and back.

I did the same thing for the figure’s tattered hood. Here’s the pattern I cut out of paper and the one I ultimately made out of worbla. I think my one big takeaway from this project as a whole is how well the worbla parts turned out. I haven’t been using worbla a ton for my current projects of late, especially since my sculpting has improved a decent amount and I have less of a need for the stuff. But for applications like this (permanent clothes on custom action figures), it really comes in handy.

I warmed up the worbla hood with my heat gun and affixed it over the head, blending the bottom edges with the rest of the shirt when it was still nice and malleable. And after that, the figure just sat around for months before I actually started painting it.

I don’t really have any intermediary pics between the point where I primed it and the when I started actually painting its basecoat. But here it is, with the flat gray primer already applied and some Citadel Macragge on the clothes just to see how it would look. For his cybernetics, I painted them black and dry brushed them with Citadel Leadbelcher.

I also gave him a belt, some shin guards, and a pair of side/hip armor plates at some point (also using worbla), though I would completely ruin the belt when I spilled superglue on it. I would also sculpt him a wrist-wrap for his organic arm out of green stuff. I’d also use to milliput to make his pants seem baggier and give his feet that classic “ninja shoes” look. And then this figure would go back to the pile of forgotten projects…

That is, until I once again got sick of looking at this figure in its partially painted state and decided to put it out of its misery once and for all. Here’s the paints I used to do that:

• Base color for clothes: Citadel Macragge Blue
• Belt, hip armor, shin guards: Reaper Dragon Blue
• Hair, pupils, undercoat for cyborg bits: Citadel Abbadon Black
• Metallic dry-brushing on cyborg bits: Citadel Leadbelcher (as well as a light dusting of Citadel Runefang steel over that)
• Flesh tone: Vallejo basic fleshtone

I kicked around the idea of giving it a wash and some highlights (and I did that a little bit on the cybernetic arm), but I was beyond ready to just call it a day on this project at this point so I just finished it off with a protective clearcoat.

The problem with circling back around to projects like this is that upon looking at them again, they serve as a stark reminding of just how much I’ve learned and how much further I’ve come since I started on them, so trying to go back and finish it feels less like the culmination of a work that I’m proud of and more like I’m trying to polish a turd. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

I do still like the basic character design (or at least the overall concept) and it might be worth revisiting in again down the road with a new color deco (green camouflage?) and a new form factor (ideally a smaller figure). That will at least give me the opportunity to apply all the things that I’ve learned about crafting, sculpting, painting, etc. since I started this project as a relative neophyte and create a vastly improved version of this character or a very similar one. It's something worth considering, at least.