Custom Action Figure – Cyberpunk Robin Hood

No fancy intro here, I just found a Snake Eyes movie Storm Shadow figure on clearance for less than $4, saw that it came with a bow and arrows, and thought it would be fun to turn into a cyberpunk version of Robin Hood. Before diving in, I set a few boundaries for myself on this project and for the most part, I stuck to them. They were:

• No joint sanding, dye the figure using Rit synthetic green dye.
• Most of the oversculpting work would be on the head, with minimal additions to anything else.
• Let the green dye undercoat do most of the work for everything else aside from the head, relying primarily on washes and dry brushing.

This project also served as the proving ground for a couple of new materials and techniques, which I’ll elaborate on later.

But before that, I would need to disassemble the figure using the tried and true boil-and-pop method.

And here it is (mostly) disassembled. I couldn’t get the upper arms out of the torso no matter how hot I boiled the water and how long I let it soak, but since it didn’t impede my ability to expose the discs in the shoulder joints to the dye, it wasn’t too big of an issue. I cleaned everything in hot water and dish soap to help ensure that no factory mold release would interfere with the next step.

I used an entire bottle of Rit synthetic peacock green dye. If you’re interested in learning more about dying action figures, there’s no shortage of youtube videos on the subject.

I don’t remember exactly how long I let the pieces soak in the peacock green dye, anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour would be my best guess. As I’ve encountered before from previous action figure dye jobs, the dye reacts differently to difference kinds of plastics and most action figures you come across are injection molded with a mix of hard and soft plastics. The dye is patchy at best (or in the case of the bow, nearly non-existent) on the parts made in harder plastics and works all too well with parts in softer plastics, turning some parts almostly completely black. I didn’t care too much, since the joints were the main concern of this exercise and they were dyed a dark enough green that they would blend in to the overall color scheme I wanted to go with for this figure. Everything else would just serve as an undercoat for when I would eventually give the figure a heavy dry brush with various shades of green and metallics.

Before starting on the figure’s head, which would be enshrouded with a hood (because it is Robin Hood, after all), I sculpted a kind of cowl around the figure’s neck and shoulders with Magic Sculpt Epoxy clay. I’d also already begun dry brushing the figure with varying shades of green and some Vallejo gunmetal on the arms and the edges of the armor, though I would go back and add some additional washes and highlights once the head was complete.

For the head, I would do things a little bit differently. I knew I could sculpt a much better hood out of polymer clay than I could with epoxy clay (I really don’t like sculpting with epoxy clays) but if I were to do so and place the original head or a resin casting of it in the oven to bake the polymer clay, the plastic would most likely melt. To get around that, I instead made a silicone mold of the Storm Shadow head and recast several copies of it in Activa Permastone. With Permastone, I can add polymer clay to the object and bake it in the oven without any worries about anything melting. I got the idea by watching some youtube videos about NerdECrafter’s various craft kits, which come with a silicone mold of a figure, some Permastone, and polymer clay (usually Super Sculpey or Cosclay) with which details can be sculpted on to the plaster figurine. Since I favor sculpting with polymer clay over the usual epoxy putties that I would typically use to add on to an existing figure, seeing this caused a lightbulb to go off in my head.

Permastone, as well as its cheaper counterpart PerfectCast, is a plaster or plasterlike casting material. It comes in a powder form that you mix with water according to the ratio set by the manufacturer. For Permastone it’s 1.5 parts Permastone powder to every one part of water. After mixing, you pour it into a mold and let it cure. You probably don’t get the best results on its own, since like a lot of resins, these plaster compounds are also prone to air bubbles but I’ve gotten some pretty stunning, bubble-free results after injecting it into my molds with a syringe and allowing it to cure in my pressure pot at the same psi that I use for resins (55-60 psi). I just don’t recommend using the stuff for more delicate parts like action figure arms or hands with splayed fingers, since the material is quite brittle and fingers will just break off when you try to take it out of the mold.

With that said, I used a bit of Alumilite Mold Putty that I got on clearance at Walmart and “sampled” some details from a number of different action figure parts and accessories that I had in my bits box (a Corps mask, a pair of Final Faction binoculars, and a few other bits I can’t identify). When these molds were cured (in about 20-30 minutes), I stuffed them with Super Sculpey firm and baked them in the oven. Once hardened, I glued them onto a Permastone casting of the Storm Shadow head to create his cyberpunk rebreather mask.

Next, I sculpted the hood using more Super Sculpey Firm and baked that in the oven. I felt something was still missing until I found some more random model pieces (I think from a Creative Fields No. 57 robot model kit) in my bits box and instead of recasting them, I just superglued them on to head to complete the mask. The next step would be to make another silicone mold, this time of the completed head, and cast it in FlexIt 90 flexible resin so that it will pop onto the figure’s existing neck joint.

Here’s where I ran into a little bit of difficulty. The first time I molded the head and attempted a resin casting, I noticed some cure inhibition on the areas where the silicone met the exposed Permastone (resulting in a head without an eye). In that moment, it dawned on me that perhaps I needed to seal the surface of the Permastone prior to molding it in silicone so I sprayed it with a coat of flat gray acrylic primer and tried again, yielding much better results. It would probably be preferable to use a proper acrylic sealer or something like Shellac, but this project predated my getting a 3D printer for rapid prototyping (and thus stocking up on a few cans of sealer) so I didn’t have any on hand. Either way, it worked and I was able to get my flexible resin casting of the modified head sculpt. I dyed the FlexIt 90 a solid green, again to act as an undercoat that wouldn’t look too out of place if any of the paint got scratched.

Prior to painting the head, I washed it with some MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) so that paint would better adhere to the flexible resin and I might have also gave it a coat of Angelus neutral (clear) leather primer as well.

There isn’t too much else I can say about the actual painting process. As I mentioned previously, it was mostly dry brushing progressively lighter shades of green and “kissing” the edges of the armor and the mask with some Vallejo gunmetal paint. For the bow that wouldn’t accept the dye, I sprayed it on both sides with Rustoleum Army Green from their Camouflage range of rattle can paints. And speaking of rattle cans, instead of applying my protective clearcoat to the finished product using a Krylon flat or glossy acrylic clearcoat, I opted to use my new airbrush to spray the figure with a few thin coats of Vallejo anti-shine matte varnish. This would give me the scratch resistance and protective coat that I needed without that pervasive rattle can stink that never really goes away.

I’m still barely getting my feet wet with airbrushing, and as of this writing, I’ve mostly just used it to apply black primer coats to miniatures and Vallejo varnish to finished projects. Here’s some action shots of project post-clearcoat.

As well as a satisfying before and after pic:

And just for fun, here he is side by side with a vintage Kevin Costner Robin Hood from Kenner’s Prince of Thieves line:

Like a lot of the projects that I initially intend to be quickie projects, this ended up taking much longer than I intended. I think I started it back in early March and only worked on it in short, intermittent bursts due to how busy I’ve been this year. Overall, I still had a lot of fun and this is easily my best custom to date (not that that’s a really high bar to set). Unsurprisingly, I have a pile of other one-off customization projects like it currently in the works and with my recent adoption of 3D printing and its boundless capabilities, expect to see more of those projects start coming out at a much quicker rate provided other aspects of my life don't continue to encroach on my hobby time (in other words, I wouldn't hold my breath).