Saturday, February 13, 2010

The amazing... SPIDERMAN





Hey All!

I've been lazing out a bit lately when it come to customizing. I have a couple of projects that range from moderately to very involved lying around in various stages of finish that I can't bring myself to wrap up. When that happens I tend to whip together a quickie repaint or head swap to warm me up and sort of get things rolling again. This time it's a Marvel Universe Spidey.
I was never happy with the Marvel Universe offering of Spiderman. He's kinda' dumpy looking and he has a head like a lightbulb. Not to mention that every variant I have of the figure needs a SERIOUS repaint. I was eagerly awaiting the new 3 3/4 inch Spidey line with high hopes that a better version of the character would be made available. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed to bits upon seeing these terrible figures first hand. I purchased the "super posable" variety hoping that I would be able to do some custom magic to help it along... but after removing it from the package I realized that there was little that could be done to salvage this pitiful piece of plastic. The head had some merit, though. It resembles the head from the Marvel Legends Showdown version from several years back, which I always admired. I decided to swap it with the Marvel Universe body and give it a repaint to see if it helped a bit. I also used some Aves Apoxy Sculpt to beef up his lats under his arms so he looked a bit more muscular.
I painted the entire figure over and rather than wash and drybrush the webs (which is the factory technique that makes these figures paint work look so terrible to begin with) I used a detail brush to carefully paint the lines in with thinned black paint. The entire figure was sealed up with Dullcoat for that perfectly flat finish.
I'm a lot happier with this version even though I'm still not crazy about the body which is still a bit funky to me, but I think the sculpted additions help a bit. The comparison photo shows my version and the original. Comments are always welcome.