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Hi out there!

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Look ma! A one-point landing! The dread sword, Darkwynd The Unmaker, is floating off to one side.

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Huh? Wha?

Hehehe... Now I know what those sports stars must feel like...

(Begin edit)

Heh, this just gets better and better... I finally looked at the Dragonball CCG card that came with the Angel Wings Goku I started from, and it's a 'you grow to monstrous size as long as this card is in play' effect (Huge Drill, if you're a DBCCG nut). Since one of my shticks is expanding to Godzilla-range size, this is surely a sign of favor from the gods on this project... Plus the card background is green. I am seriously tempted to go out and grab a starter deck for the tame now, just out of curiosity... of course, that IS what they pack a card in for, but oh well.

Since it strikes me that some might be curious as to how I accomplished this mighty feat of self-gratuity, a brief explanation of the making of a personal action figure awaits in a seperate reply.

You know, in case someone wants to try making one of an actual EPU related character, or something.

- ClassicDrogn, higher than high, the natural way

It is first desireable to have some skill at carving big chunks of plastic that's the wrong shape into smaller (but not too small) chunks of plastic that are, but if you're not in the mood to practise for a few years before beginning, taking the smallest possible cuts and alternating from right to left on each cut so you keep things even, whiule also keeping a reference image (or several) in front of you will at least give you a good chance of not going far wrong. Also remmber to cut in such manner that if (when) you slip, you will not hit yourfself. And have a box of bandaids and medicated jelly handy for when you do anyway (I have yet to get through the carving part of any project with less tthan two bandaids)

Now, on to the cutting people down part.

You first have to find a starting point for your figure. I picked Angel Wings Goku because a) it had really nice wings, which are very hard to make from scratch, b) it was otherwise fairly normally proportioned, except for c) outragously overdeveloped muscles and a slightly oversized head, allowing me to carve out the details on the planned figure instead of trying to build them up. I actually reccomend Dragonball toys for this if thwere's one that's about right for your project, as the bottom-end ones are all solid, rubbery plastic, easy to carve without worry of opening holes into a hollow middle, on the head and limbs at least. They also have very good hand sculpts, generally.

The first task was to live Chichi's dream, and tame the Son hairdo. Because it's all rubbery plastic on the DBZ toyline, it was actually easier to just slice throuhg the spikes than to saw them off - extreme caution was needed to avoid having the knife slice me after getting through the spike, though, as it takes a lot of force to make such a deep cut even in rubbery plastic. I had to keep in mind the need to make ears sticking up later, and even so due to the way the spikes were positioned had to make them a little far foreward in the end. You might as well carve off the nose right away too, the things are almost sharp enough to break the skin if you've got a good griop on the head to carve, and the Dragonball faces are squised down to about half the size they should be anyway. Rough out the head if you like, but leave the detailing for last, because slips on the torso can easily put unintended scars on the cheeks, eyes, or forehead, let alone chopping off humanlike tiny noses that are a pain to carve out, a bigger pain to build back up, and really bad looking if you leave them off and say it's a distant relation of Krillin.

The next part I did was the torso, not a lot to do here, just cut down the folds of the gi to be my own light armor plates. Since the chest is hard plastic, I did end up going through it into the chest in the crease between the chestplates and part of the abdominal panel, but that was easily filled with some Gamer's Workshop epoxy putty. I reccomend this highly over traditional white putty used for pewter figures, the epoxy seems to stick to plastic better and after ten minutes or so sculpts very easily as long as you keep the tool (I just used my fingers and the balde of the X-Acto knife) wet so the putty won't stick. Use extreme caution, again, if you decide to do this by licking it regularly, the epoxy won't be present in dangerous quantities but tounges bleed a lot. A whole lot. Somewhwere in here I cut down the wings just slightly around the buitt, so there would be room for the tail I eventually would add.

Next, the arms. I used the point of the XActo to scribe in the paint where I wanted armor plates, then cut around the outlines so I could carve out around the plates, and smoothed off the muscle bulges on the armor and the edge of the armband away from the wrist, the wrist end I left to be the front of my armor armbands, which are quite a bit larger than Goku's. The left arm got some putty again to build my tech-watch and it's criss-cross band, though that actually didn't get added until after I'd painted the armband because I forgot about it originally ^_^: I also used the tip of the blade to scrath all the non-armor parts of the arm, because my netself has fur.

The legs followed much the same pattern, cutting away the folds of the pants to smooth the upper legs, the scathing in fur as above, and cutting down the lower legs to have armor boots. Note that most dragonball figures have really thick ankles for their size otherwise, front-to-back if not sideways as well - I cut them down to about half of their starting size front-to-back in this case and they still look a little big to me. I debated building up the knee spikes, but decided that the baggy knees were big enough to just carve them into after all.

I did use putty to build up a codpiece whyere the original figure had a kung-fu-pants guset molded in, and included the beltbucke of the belt this figure is unfortunately just a little too short in the waist to have, however while the putty was still quite soft I bent the hips fully foreward to make sure they wouldn't be blocked and worked around the profile that created for the codpiece, I also swiveled the waist to its built in stops to make sure it would not be obstructed.

Then the really hard part - figutrring how to get glue to stick to craft foam so I could add the hip plates and shoulder guards, which could not be carved. The glue I use is Pacer Zap CA+ (the green label kind) which is essentially the same as department store superglue, but a bit thicker, supplied with a fine-drop nozzle, and without the retardants that give it a department store shelf life and make it so that the only thing on the planet that it will actually glue together is fingers. Zap is still exceptionally good at gluing fingers, but it will glue them to any non-porous surface except the kind of plastic they make milkjugs and most other food containers out of, and most porous substances that aren't so porous they wick it all away before anything can touch them. The opint here is that it also glues any of those things to each other, which is what we're looking for here, I found that distressing the surface of the foam gave it enouhg of a bite for the glue to stick, and cut out little tringles to be the hip gurads, glued three layers together to be cut into a tail, and built up the shoulder pieces. Because the foam is very elastic and pliable, having them glued in place doesn't block the motion of the limbs because the foam moves around them, while those same properties make it exceptionally difficult to actually sculpt. I ended up cutting the corners of the pieces into diagonal bevels with scissors, and calling it good enough.

Finish up the head scuplt, and it's time to start painting. Actual directions for sculpting heads have fiulled entire books, so unfortunately I must leave you to your own devices on that; for my own toy, the original mouth line became the bottom of a dog-like nose on the snout, while the chin became the lower lip. Since I otherwise had a fairly simple helmet and visor, getting the snout even was the hardest part - the ears are far enough apart that as long as they're rouhgly the same no one will be able to tell without specifically looking that they're inconsistant, thoguh as previously noted they ended up being a little too far foreward to be perfect. They came out very well, though, I think. On to the painting!

For a base, to cover up all the orange gi and pink skin, I just used Testors grey spray primer - it's all too easy to get too heavy of a coat of this stuff, since a figure is so irregular, and don't forget to move the joints to one extreme, spray, then to other and sray again so you don't have unintentional masked spots. As soon as I could I wiped most of it back off of the wings, just leaving a wash effect. Anywhere that was supposed to be grey got a slightly darker Gundam Marker paint on it, so that paint wqear would just highlight the scribed-in fur and look better, This qualifies as a Cunning Plan(tm), and wonder of wonders, actually seems to be working. The visor and techwatch controls got Gundam Marker gold, the armor Gundam Marker metal green and Tamiya Marker silver. Darkwynd is Testors Marker black and Gundam Marker metal blue, the tech watch strap is also metal blue for reasons that are too involved to go into here.

The second challenge the foam offered was getting the green to look right, because it's metallic green, and the Gundam Markers I was using to paint it with had too fine a silver component. All the silver sank into the pores of the foam, leaving them plain green, which wouldn't do. Fortunately, the Tamiya silver paint marker I had for the other armor bits was thicker stuff, I did all the foam armor over with it and then the green, and it came out fairly well. The foam 'basket' on the sword hilt hadn't been a problem, as the black was both solid and beefy, but the grey paint marker was fairly used when I started and kinda petered out on the tail, leaving it slightly irregularly colored, as well as slightly square... oh well, it's not usually in the main view, it's just this thing that follows me around, you know?

Finally, it was done... and the best thing about Gundam Markers is that they're completely dry in about fifteen minutes, so you can get right to playing with yourself. Beofre scanning the toy, I had it stomp some Bionicle Toas, a couple Decpeticons, and Mecha-Godzilla, which is why there's some paint wear already in those pictures... Anyway, if you're thinking about making a toy of yourself, or as in my case your netself (since for my meatself I'd have to start with Android 19 or Majin Buu...) I hope this has given you some hints, and not scared you off. I'm serious here, I still feel like I won the lottery or something each time I look up to the top of my monitor, and see me looking back.

- CD

Huge Drill - All of your physical attacks do +1 power stage damage. Attacks
that cannot be stopped can be stopped when this Drill is in play. "Muahahahah!
That's right, Mechagodzilla! Flee! Flee in terror of my Aardly Might!
TRAAAIN WRECK BLAAAAAAAST!!"

... or go to www.andgor.com and pay them to do it.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

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Note that I don't actually partake, but it seemed like the best product placement...

- CD