Shop Log – 7/8/22

My staycation has been flying by and it’s hard to believe it’s been almost a week since my last shop log. Thankfully, I do have something to show for it. As of today, I’ve finished casting the last five figures in my first wave of Mr. Boneface figures, completing the entire run of fifteen figures across three unique designs. Granted, they’re still long a way off from being ready for sale on my Etsy store. I need to do some final cleanup on the castings, prep them for paint, add the paint apps, figure out what to do for accessories and then cast those (more on that in a bit), and create their packaging (I’m still set on a simple poly bag and header card). But at least the really labor-intensive part of casting each part and assembling them is out of the way.

As for their accessories, I want to give each Mr. Boneface at least one weapon (though I admit I haven’t had a ton of luck casting those in the past) and a wearable item of clothing that I initially planned to cut out of simple EVA foam but now, I think I’m opting to cast from highly flexible Flex-It 40 resin. According to the durometer shore hardness scales I’ve seen, Flex-It 40 is in the medium soft range and has the feel of an eraser. That’s why I purchased a 32 oz kit of it for my eventual Monster In My Pocket/M.U.S.C.L.E.-inspired keshi figures. It’s only just recently occurred to me that it might also be good for making wearable armor and other accessories for my MOTU-style figures.

But before I can even think about casting them, I need to first figure out what I want these wearable accessories to be (capes, armor, etc), make patterns of them, cut those patterns out of styrene or some other hard material, and then make molds of those for which I can pour my flexible resin. At this stage, I’m still cutting random patterns out of paper and test fitting them to my prototype figures to see what works. When I eventually nail the basic designs, I’ll probably make final patterns in Photoshop and print those out on rigid cardstock rather than just freehanding it like I was when I took the pic below.

Since I brought it up, I did some initial kitbashing for my “Mayhem In Your Pocket” series of keshi figures, using the bootleg mini wrestlers (as well as urethane copies of said bootleg mini wrestlers) that I mentioned previously as the basic framework I’m building on. While I am going to do some fairly extensive oversculpting on these little figures, I decided to just start kitbashing by gluing on random bits from models, cheapo toys, and miscellaneous resin castings and see what I come up with. For these three, I want to make the one with the plastic skeleton head some kind of mutant, the guy in the middle a cybernetic samurai (his head came from a Creative Assembly No. 57 model kit and his gasa/ronin hat was a trash can lid that came with the bootleg wrestler playset), and the one on the right I’m turning into a kind of robot fighter heavily inspired by the Probotectors from the European versions of the Contra game series. His head is a resin copy I made of a Robotech/Macross capsule figure.

I’m just kind of on and off working on this project between all my other ones, so don’t expect a ton of progress right away (at least not until my Mr. Boneface figures are further along).

And now for something completely different. Like these mysterious, brightly colored eggs. Easter was almost three months ago, so what could possibly be inside of these…

If you guessed “four inch scale plastic soldiers”, then give yourself a pat on the back. There’s twelve figures in total, but only six unique designs with half painted in the usual toy soldier approximation of military camouflage and the other half painted in a kind of dark blue SWAT/police style theme.

I saw these on Amazon for about $5-6 dollars as a heavily discounted warehouse return, down from their normal listing price of like $23 (though I can’t imagine anyone paying that much for something like this). Not only was the idea of a cheapo action figure as an Easter egg party favor weirdly intriguing to me, I was even more intrigued by the fact that they all have interchangeable parts that are connected with simple ball and socket joints that are not entirely dissimilar to the buck system I use for my MOTU-inspired figures. If you’ve been keeping up with my shop logs, then you probably know where I’m going with this and you’re probably asking yourself, “does he really need another buck system for yet another potential line of action figures?”

Well no, but actually yes. There’s something I’ve been wanting to try. Yes, it’s another buck body but one that’s slightly different from the “basic shared parts” buck system that I currently employ.

You see, I was listening to a podcast where a former toy sculptor was brought on as a guest. He spoke about his time working on the GI Joe: Real American Hero line during the early 90’s, where he’d start with a blank GI Joe buck and sculpt the details of the character out of wax (that would later be turned into the metal tooling for the eventual plastic injection molding process).

I thought it might be fun to make my own action figure blanks for the eventuality of my own line (or lines) of four-inch scale, five POA figures using the joint system found in these cheapo toy soldiers. Though instead of wax, I’d be sculpting over the blanks with my usual materials like Green Stuff, Apoxie Sculpt, Milliput, random bits and super glue, etc. And like my Mayhem In Your Pocket keshi figures, I’d take the customized “blanks” (of which I plan to make a whole bunch of out of rigid urethane casting resin), make molds of the heavily customized blanks (which would no longer be blank at this stage), and then cast the final figures from those in my typical action figure resin (Flex-It 90, naturally).

For my first blank, I took this helmet guy and dremeled off pretty much all of his details so that the resulting buck body will be a clean slate that I can customize into any kind of figure that I want. Here’s my blankified (to coin a phrase) version side by side with his formerly identical twin from the same set. I plan to fill in the holes left by my dremel with Apoxie sculpt after I do a little but more sanding to make the parts as smooth as possible before I make individual molds of the blank arms, legs, and head. I set aside another set of arms that I still need to sand down, ones that are in a kind of rifle-holding pose reminiscent of the old Remco Sgt. Rock figures.

And speaking of buck systems and the sets of molds that go along with them, I decided that I would once again try to make molds of my mini bootleg Skeletor figure from Mexico. Previously, I tried to make molds of its arms, torso, head, and legs with Let’s Resin brand silicone rubber that I bought on Amazon and had no such luck. But a while back, I tried it again with the SRC brand Cast-A-Mold rubber that I use for all of my other projects and the molds turned out great! Here’s the original (in blue) side by side with a test casting using my mini-MOTU bootleg molds (in purple and green) with a M.U.S.C.L.E. figure for scale (one that was also duplicated using Cast-A-Mold rubber).

Yeah, my mold library has expanded greatly but that’s kind of what happens when you buy silicone rubber in bulk.

I also did a little bit of sculpting with Green Stuff just for fun and practice. I had this random toy soldier that I started to turn into the guy from Xeno Crisis (not as a mold/resin casting, but just for my own amusement). I also worked on some customized head sculpts for my MOTU-style figures because I had an idea about making a Splatterhouse and/or Friday the 13th-inspired horror character for my next 5” scale series after Mr. Boneface (if I don’t decide to first do a series with the wrestler figure molds that I recently added to my buck system library). I wasn’t happy with these head sculpts, but I’m still trying.

 I’m also still working on sculpting the details for my custom Xeno Crisis space marine figure, since the character in the game has some random belts and pouches and things that I need to add to his uniform before I can start painting him.

And that’s all I have for this Shop Log. My life could be getting a bit chaotic in the days and weeks to come. I hope not and I hope to continue to chug along with my never-ending list of projects, but another period of radio silence might be forthcoming so be warned. Until next time…