garbageboxlove

Velma custom figure

Last updated: 4·30·2003
my first finished custom


Materials used:

This was made for a friend's birthday. She got the nickname Velma (the Scooby Doo cartoon character) because she kind of looks like her. One of my friends bought the figure to put on the cake. She mentioned that it would be funny if we could give the figure a Wal-Mart vest (that's where we work), so I volunteered to customize it.

I made the vest by adding some Super Sculpey to Velma's shirt. Only enough to show the outside edges of a vest, blending the sculpey with parts of the shirt.

In progress images:

After sculpting the vest, I boiled it in a large pot to cure the sculpey. I probably boiled it too long, as the sculpey left a residue on parts of the figure that I didn't put sculpey on. Also the leg joints loosened up, to a point that I ended up sticking pieces of cardboard in them to stiffen them up again.

Painting the figure was the second easiest task. First I cut pieces of masking tape to cover the areas I didn't want to paint over. That's probably considered an "easy way out" of painting professionally or whatever... but with only a few hours left to finish working, it became necessary. I used Apple Barrel's True Navy, which turned out to be almost the exact color -- and a good thing too because it was the only blue paint I had on hand.

After the paint dried, I made the Wal-Mart logo (on the figure's back) and name tag on the computer and printed them out. I super-glued the name tag to a piece of thin cardboard to make it 3-D, trimmed it, and then super-glued that to the figure. (In hindsight, I wished I had glued it to the figure before painting... but that would have proven difficult.) I trimmed the Wal-Mart logo and glued the paper directly to the figure's back. When the glue dried, I finished the vest with Tamiya Color acrylic clear coat, giving the name tag and Wal-Mart logo an extra coat. After it was all dried, I peeled the masking tape away, touched up the edges of the vest, and my first fully completed customized action figure was finally done!

Finished images. The name on the name tag is obscured in these pics.

It's amazing what I can accomplish -- well, finish, when I concentrate on a project. The limited time frame I had to work helped too. I'm a horrible procrastinator. I even got other work done while waiting for the paint to dry on this...