Pestilence

Hey everyone! A new custom finally!
This time round it's Pestilence of the four horsemen from the Archie TMNT Adventures series.
As you may recall I did a figure of Death a few years back.
Pestilence has always been my favorite of the bunch as his design is just so cool!(We can thank Peter Laird for that)
I do plan to make the other two horsemen in time, but I'm sad to say I'm going to be taking a bit of a break as of this post.
I won't be gone for to long though you can count on that. :)
I made Pestilence by completely sanding down a McFarlane Toys Total Chaos Quartz figure and sculpting over the entire body.
I got the idea for the texture of the figure from an old Toy Biz Spider-Man Swarm figure.
Though I did all of the texturing for this by hand.
I did try to leave as much articulation as possible but it wasn't easy with this one.
And while he isn't my largest custom he is by far the heaviest of the bunch.

I'm really happy with how he turned out and I hope you are as well.

You can catch Pestilence in TMNT Adventures issues #38, #39, & Mighty Mutanimals #6

Cha Ocho

Well It's been awhile again..work and life get in the way of fun stuff like TMNT customs.

But here is Cha Ocho of Mirage TMNT Volume 4 & Tales of the TMNT Volume 2.

This was a character that I thought would be easy to make at first but ran into many road blocks when working on it.

The biggest problem was consistency which tends to be a problem when basing a toy off of a character that has been drawn by quite a few people.

Not to mention we don't see him in color very often, as the Mirage comics are black & white (besides the covers).
I had to take a bit from other images of volume 4 Foot Soldiers to bring it all together into something I was happy with.


This figure was made using a DC Universe Classics John Stewart figure and lost os sculpting (New hair, straps, katana sheath, leg armor, Arm armor, shoulder armor, foot and hand armor)

I hope you folks out there enjoy him as well.

More to come soon and I hope this time it won't be another 4 months.

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD!

This I think is one of my best customs, mostly because I've put allot of time into it as it's not for myself.
This figure is for my friend and creator of this character Steve Murphy so I wanted to make sure everything was to exact detail for him.
Sadly this shouldn't have taken me as long as it did but I had a few paint problems along the way.
I used a WWE Armando Estrada figure as the base incase anyone wanted to know.
The Gun comes from a Movie Spawn figure & The Cigar comes from a Don Moncinni Gangsters Inc figure which will be used for another upcoming custom.
I based his look on various appearances through the comics but his outfit is based on the United We Stand Divided We Fall storyline from TMNT Adventures & Mighty Mutanimals.
If you're not familiar with these comics you should be so check them out over at
http://www.ninjaturtles.com/comics/archie/archie.htm
http://www.ninjaturtles.com/comics/archie/mutanimals.htm

VACUUM-METALIZED FUGITOID!

Today Peter Laird shared some images on his blog of a Vac-Metal Fugitoid that Playmates may be producing.Just Like Peter I've been waiting years for this to happen.So please if you feel the same way share your excitement on his blog about just how cool this is.Sadly it's not articulated but perhaps we can change their minds to give the figure just a little bit.

Please check out Peters Blog HERE and let him know what you think.

Complete Carnage

So this one I worked on for about 2 weeks as my schedule is very busy right now.
I used a DC Universe Etrigan the Demon figure for the base as it's been made known to me that this is the character Kevin Eastman was inspired by when creating Complete Carnage.
What I did to the figure was: sanded it down from head to toe, took off his bracelets, then went at the head sanding down the horns and nose, I pretty much sculpted a new face over the head extending the jaw so it hangs more like Carnage's does, added the little blocks on top of his head as advised by Ryan Brown (The Spiked head look came later and is sacrilegious according to him), I sliced part of the fin ear things off the side of his head as well to match the number Carnage had on his design, & I also added nipples to his chest as every time we see the character he's had them.
The paint was done using both glossy and flat acrylic paints and several washes of different shades of gray.
This was a very fun character to make and I hope I can make Radical some point down the road as well.
If anyone has any questions please feel free to ask.
Oh and if you want to view the images in full size just click them.

Attack Of The Neutrinos (part 2 in 3 part series)

Well this damn figure (Kala) and her little Pet the Grybyx have taken me forever to finish what with starting a job and trying to get them as perfect as I can so I don't have to hear to much of "I'd have done it this or that way" and then having the Grybyx's arm's break off and having to resculpt him.
I've also been working on a set of 4 custom TMNT for Spitfire, Finishing a painting for a client, and just started working a cd design for a local band. So there hasn't been much time for me to do my own projects and trust me there are allot of TMNT customs I've got lined up.
I was never happy with how Kala was painted and the things she came with, that's why I did this.
One of the hardest parts was trying to do the cartoonish black outlines around the figures as I had to keep going back over and repainting color parts as the paint would get on a little to much.
The other thing that made this so difficult was the fact that the shade of green that they used on Kala's outfit in the show isn't sold in stores so I had to mix quite a few shades together for that and some other things like the Grybyx's eyes.
I really tried as hard as I could though to get these things to look as close to the show, so I hope you enjoy them.

Teenagers From Dimension X

Last time I showed the start of my custom corrected Zak the Neutrino figure.
Now it's time to share the final piece with an extra photo of Zak with the 4 NECA TMNT to show the height of the figure matches pretty closely to how it should in conjunction to the turtles and the style trying to closely match that of the new NECA figures.

TMNT RETRO

Steve Murphy Asked Me what I think TMNT Retro should be so here it goes:
What I think a Retro line should be is a small list of the original cast of the old cartoon the TMNT, Splinter, April, Shredder, Krang, Bebop, Rocksteady, a Foot Soldier, and Perhaps General Traag just to even things out a bit in the exact looks they had in either the very first episodes they had been in or during the later season of the show in the first season 8 episode "Get Shredder", I think the characters look top Notch around this time or a little before in the end of season 7.
I'd say give it a chance if it's successful try with a few more characters such as Leatherhead or Slash as they had been in the old toon style for 2 more series.
The title Retro is given because it is marketed towards older fans who grew up with the series and the casual viewer who goes wow krang or bebop I remember them from when I was a kid I want that it looks just like the show and is better than the one I had as a kid, which will happen as let's face it adults want quality items.We're talking retro for everyone but when it comes down to it, it's the adults who would buy these even on a whim.

But you really never know who's going to buy things and I mean no one does not even people who think they know, They want to make TMNT variants make ones like these ideas and not only will you have your variants but you'll be making allot of older fans happy as well and not only that but they will be much better updated versions hopefully done by Neca or by Playmates if they realize that today's action figure market is allot different than it used to be.

By that I mean that figures are very articulated for the most part or have very detailed sculpts and 9 times out of 10 look exactly like the characters they are based on and are in the correct height/ Scale with every other character in the series they come from.

I really can't stress that there is no better time than now to do this with the turtles anniversary around the corner, I feel if this is passed up now it may never happen.

The images are official style guides used for the 80's-90's cartoon series as well as some screen caps as examples of what I'm talking about.