Project Log 5/15/22: Paint Tests, Head Sculpts, Tecnicos, Baltards, and JRPGs

Since I’ll mainly be focusing on a handful of the same projects for the foreseeable future, I decided a general Project Log makes more sense than yet another What’s On My Desk update, which up until now was more or less my way of just mentioning what projects I’m currently working on with minimal details on how the projects are actually going. My usual typical was to make a brief update about what I’m working on then do an article about the project from start to finish once I was finally done with it, but as I get busier and busier in my hobby life and non-hobby life, I think a slightly different approach may be necessary going forward.

It’s my intent for these Project Logs to combine both the What’s On My Desk WIP updates with what I typically present in my finished project articles and hopefully keep these blog updates coming at a more consistent pace (ideally, at least once a week which is what I’d always intended when I started a blog in the first place). Not saying that I’ll completely discontinue finished project articles and brief updates, but I might just save those for little one-off/quickie projects (but who knows when I’ll get the chance to do one of those again). With that said, here’s what I’ve been up to this past week.

Pictured above is my big box of parts I casted for my first set of articulated bootleg MOTU art figures. Aside from five copies of some custom head sculpts (which I’ll get to next), I’ve parts enough for nine figures. Six will be part of a set that I’m calling “Mr. Boneface” (featuring Skeletor and Scareglow-inspired heads) and three will be part of a different set that I’m tentatively calling “Death Master” (inspired by Death Adder/Death Bringer/Death Adder Jr. from the Golden Axe games).

The gray parts you see here were sprayed with Mr. Surfacer 500, a Japanese modeling/Gunpla product that is supposed to fill in gaps and fix little holes but honestly, the results have been pretty mixed. I understand that it takes several alternating passes of Mr. Surfacer and rounds sanding, but man alive. I keep finding little pinholes that should have already been filled in on the first coat but aren’t. Mr. Surfacer’s companion products, Mr. Surfacer 1200 and Mr. Dissolved Putty, have yielded similarly disappointing results. The white powdery looking surfaces were treated with a generous coating of Vallejo Plastic Putty and those too have been pretty hit-or-miss in filling in the small defects, but I’ve been making some headway. Vallejo Plastic Putty has its own problems, as it’s overly sticky, soft, doesn’t smooth out too terrible well, and can’t fill in larger/deeper defects to save its life. For those, I fear that I’ll have to break out the Milliput to fill in. Which is fine, it’s just a pain to mix up when you’re doing a million other things on top of that.

That’s nine sets of arms, legs, torsos, and heads that I’ve been surfacing, sanding, and working to fill in the obvious air bubbles that are present in the casting despite my best efforts to pour the resin into the mold in slow, thin streams (the three-minute pot life of the Flex-It 90 flexible urethane resin makes that incredibly difficult, however). Yes, it’s an ungodly amount of work and yes, most of this could be avoided by getting a pressure pot. Which I definitely plan to buy the near future but the problem is, the California Air Tools pressure pot and super quiet air compressor I have my eyes on are about $410 and I kind of want to gauge the level of interest in my figures before I commit to that level of investment. Plus, I just recently paid off my 2021 Crosstrek because I was getting sick of the monthly $330 car payment on top of all my other bills, so now would probably be a good opportunity to give my bank account some time to bounce back a little before I make any other big purchases.

“But, Matt,” I can hear you say, “you can totally get a $100 pressure pot for paint from Harbor Freight and just convert it into a pressure pot for resin casting! Here’s a link to a youtube video!”

Nah. I’ve watched close to a dozen youtube videos of people converting Harbor Freight pressure pots for resin casting, the majority of them using about $50 worth of extra parts and jumping through hoops to get the bottom of the pot flat enough so that the molds you place inside are on level ground. Having a good idea of my own limitations, the margin of error for me to screw all of that up is way, way too high. I would rather pay about $50 extra for a California Air Tools pressure pot that’s specifically made for resin casting than risk wasting $150+ dollars on something that could potentially blow up in my face (maybe even in the literal sense).

These are the aforementioned custom head sculpts. More accurately, they’re preexisting action figure head casts that I’ve added Green Stuff details to prior to molding them in silicone. The skull with the commando bandanna/martial arts headband will be part of my Mr. Boneface line while the horned helmeted head will be used for my three figure “Death Master” series, but both will use the same MOTU bootleg buck body (if you don’t know what an action figure buck system is, definitely check out Spector Creative’s fascinating video on the subject).

The middle head is from an Adventure Man figure (a bootleg Rambo/MOTU series of figures from the 80’s, see Phelan’s video here) where the Rambo bandanna was originally just a splash of red paint on the forehead and down the left side of the head. I wasn’t happy with that, so I took the liberty of sculpting one on a resin casting I made of the Adventure Man head. And as you’ll see later, I have plans for my own Adventure Man-style line of 80’s action hero figures in the very near future so look forward to that.

The other two custom barbarian heads are from the default head that came with the bootleg He-Man figure that I used to make my basic buck body for my MOTU KO figures. One I gave a studded circlet inspired by Arnold from the first Conan movie and the other, I added some Conan the Cimmerian comic style bangs. In the very real eventuality that I decide to make a barbarian-centric of fantasy bootleg MOTU figures, these should provide some fun opportunities for different variants.

It will be interesting to see how these heads come out, especially since a few of them were cast in Flex-It 90 (others in regular epoxy resin, since I figured that would be easier to work with) and I never tried making a silicone mold of anything I previously casted in that before. As of this writing, the silicone molds of these heads are still curing and I probably won’t check on them until tomorrow morning (even though the Let’s Resin brand silicone I’ve been using has been curing exceptionally fast).

All of that work I mentioned above in prepping each of my bootleg MOTU figures is for the eventuality of painting, which is the part I most look forward to on every project. I decided to assemble a paint test figure from my “reject” pieces (as you can see from this less-than-clean casting pictured above) to see just how well paint would adhere to flexible resin, since I’d never painted it before. And there were…challenges.

Despite washing all the sanding, washing in acetone, priming with Bulldog adhesion promoter, priming again with a flat black Rustoleum primer, priming a third time with yet more Bulldog, AND applying a glossy Krylon clearcoat when I was all done, the paint job STILL didn’t pass the fingernail scratch test. On the bright side, there was only minimal cracking when you bent the arms at unnatural angles and the paint just didn’t flake off like I was kind of expecting it to after seeing Rainbow Yawn’s video on this very problem. For figures that I’m planning to sell, the paint job has to pass my quality standards and as of right now, it doesn’t.

So I’m going to do exactly what Rainbow Yawn did and bought some MEK, butyl gloves, and 2K scratch-resistant automotive clearcoat which should hopefully solve the paint problem. My stuff should all arrive by Friday, which should give me a window of time to get the rest of my parts prepped and ready to be cleaned with MEK, painted, and sprayed with 2K clearcoat. I’m really hoping that works.

In addition to the first of what will be several custom “Adventure Man” heads, I also made a mold and initial casting of Adventure Man’s legs that I modified to fit with my pre-existing torso mold to add yet another interchangeable part to my buck system. I like these because you can do all kinds of fun camouflage and variant paint apps on these. This will be the standard pair of legs for my eventual Action Hero throwback line of figures, but I probably won’t start casting pieces on that until my initial waves of figures are done and ready for sale.

I’ve also been kicking around the idea of sculpting a bandolier or two on the pre-existing torso and making a new mold of that for use on this series but I’m starting to run out of silicone and there’s still a handful of other parts I want to make molds of first before I get too heavily into that. I’d rather just save on the mold (since the torsos are massive silicone hogs) and make the bandoliers a separate accessory but I still need to figure out how to do that.

And speaking of other molds, I also decided to make an entirely different set of molds for another one of the vintage MOTU bootlegs in the collection: this random Baltard figure. This is a completely different buck body than the one I molded previously for all of my above mentioned figures, as this one is slightly smaller and the legs are molded into the torso with only the arms and the head as removable pieces.

There were a few hiccups in making these molds, the first of which being a leakage in the cylindrical cut mold I used for the body and legs where over half of it leaked out of the bottom of the cardboard tube that I used as the mold surround (hot glue can be pretty useless sometimes). The final mold is way taller than normal because when I topped up the mold (the cured silicone having sealed up the leak), I peeled all the spilled silicone off my kitchen floor and cut it up into pieces before placing it back into the mold, not wanting it to be a total waste.

The other issue I ran into was the little “peg” that makes the socket where the right arm fits onto the ball joint on the body didn’t stay attached to the mold, I think because I prefilled the socket holes in the arms with silicone before I filled up the rest of the mold. And since the arms were a two-part mold, I must have accidentally gotten some of the Vaseline petroleum jelly that I was using as a mold release onto the silicone that filled the right arm, hence why it didn’t stick to the rest of the silicone.

The mold for the head seemed to have come out nicely and while I intended it as a two-part cap mold, I left a little hinge where (for whatever reason) the silicone halves didn’t separate. I want to make a series of Baltard figures in different color decos using the last of my Flex-It 90 resin and while the molds look pretty good, I haven’t had the chance to do an initial clean-out casting with them yet. I want to cast the last five heads for my Mr. Boneface and Death Master lines first before I experiment with what remains of the resin.

And I haven’t forgotten about the little resin luchadores that I said I was also going to put up for sale, painting basecoats and applying a wash to most of the Tecnicos (the good guys have the blue bases while the bad guys, the Rudos, have red bases) last night. There were a few that needed additional sanding, as you can see above, which means more touching up will be needed. If I do get around to finishing these, I’ll probably only do eight sets of two (one tecnico and one rudo) instead of the ten sets that I’d originally planned.

Honestly, the more I work on these, the more I’m on the fence about wanting to sell them or even finish them right now. It sucks, because I’ve already made and printed out some header cards for the poly bags that I planned to package them in:

But if you’ve read any of my articles about my previous projects, this is usually the stage where I doubt myself and do a complete 180 by the time I finish dry brushing and adding the final clearcoat, so who knows. On the other hand, I feel like they’re taking away from me working on other projects that I would rather be working on (namely my MOTU bootleg figures as well as the novel that I’m still writing, although not as often as I’d like to).

That also hurts these figurines, because I’m stretched so thin that I can’t really give the quality of paint apps and the detail these luchador figurines need to not look so…wonky (especially the eyes, which were fairly simple to paint in other projects but for whatever reason, are giving me a really hard time here). I hate to leave a project unfinished and I’m not saying that will be the case here as I’ve already sunk quite a bit of time into these, but going forward, I’m probably not going to make them any kind of a priority until I get through the major thresholds holding back my MOTU bootleg figures.

These were always meant to be just a small-ticket item for my Etsy store and the more I think about it, the more I’m unsure of whether or not these are something that people would actually be interested in. Maybe I’ll just do a couple sets instead of all eight, put them up, and see if the other ones are worth my time to finish. But like I said, it probably makes a lot more sense to focus on my big ticket items right now and leave the miscellaneous tat for later.

To close things out, I’ve started getting more into the idea of sculpting my own resin art toy from (mostly) scratch. Since I always have to have some kind of kernel of an idea before I start making anything (even if it’s just a practice piece), the idea I landed on is for a three POA action figure I’m calling the “Silent Protagonist”. Taking inspiration from the JRPGs of my youth (particularly Crono from Chrono Trigger and Randi from Secret of Mana, two character designs with a shared history), I printed out some reference photos scaled to 3.5” and made a wire armature based on that. I didn’t do a TON on this project just yet, aside from making said armature and covering it with Apoxie Sculpt to form that basic shape and make sure the proportions were relatively close to the character designs I wanted to emulate. I’d originally wanted to use polymer clay, but since I’m still pretty new to sculpting, I wanted my initial attempt to be with a material that I’m more familiar with using (as opposed to polymer clay, which I’ve never used before and haven’t taken my stuff out of its package yet).

The head and hands I made using some extra hands and face plates from a bootleg Sword Art Online Kirito figure that I got on Ali Express years ago. I wanted the basic anime-face shape as well as the hands (which I don’t trust myself with sculpting in their entirety at this stage), and since these were more or less in scale with my reference pics, I made a mold of these pieces with Oyumaru Blue Stuff and replicated them with Green Stuff so that I’d have them on hand when I was ready to make the arms and the head. 

I also gave him little arm pegs, as I found that when you’re adding articulation to a figure’s arms, it’s much easier for the pegs to be connected to the torso than the arms. Thus far in my experiments, arms with ball joints attached to them always fall out of the sockets in the torso when you try to rotate them no matter how well the two seem to fit together at first. I’ve had much better luck with ball joints on the torso and sockets in the arms.

The Silent Protagonist concept is one that I’m really excited about and I hope to get the chance to sculpt a little bit more, one piece/layer at a time, throughout the week. People tend to respond well to the nostalgic video game projects, so I think I might be onto something.