You’ll have to forgive me. I actually wrote this whole post out once, tried to published and was informed that all that work had been deleted and not posted. Blerg. Anyway, this custom project of taking the Mattel DC Universe Classics classic Hawkman and turning him into the 90s version of the character as you can see above. I used a few new techniques that I’d never used before like dremeling, sculpting and dry brushing. I started this project all the way back in January and didn’t finish til this week when I felt particularly artsy. Anyway, here’s the side by side with the original and the finished product.Hit the jump if you want to read all the steps I took to go from the figure on the left to the one on the right. As always, the first step is to wash the figure with dish detergent and then take it apart. I heated the head with a hairdryer and popped it off with no problem. The wings gave me more trouble as the hair dryer only seemed to weaken the main part of the plastic and not the part holding it on his back. As a result, it snapped right off. I also sliced the yellow thing that holds his chest emblem.Next I used my then-new dremel to sand down the raised line on the boots to get a flatter look. The 90s Hawkman’s boots have more of a lip to them and not the pointy-ness of the classic version. It was my first time using a dremel, but it was pretty easy. I highly recommend getting some kind of eye protection though, as the plastic does fly. I also realized I needed something to build the boots, utility belt and arm and leg bands the character sported, so I asked sculptor Kyle Robinson who did some of the Customizing 101s I edited back in my ToyFare days. He recommended I get Apoxie Sculpt from ArtPlace.com, which I did. Another step I took, was taking the exacto knife and carving chest and arm hair into Hawkman’s chest. More on that later. The way the apoxie works is you mix equal amounts from the white and black jars and go to town. I mixed way more than I needed and ended up making a little snowman with the surplus. I tried to keep the strips straight, but as you can see things turned out a little lumpy. I later went through and sanded and dremeled to get a smoother look. By the way, you can see the chest hair where some of the apoxie from my gloves got in the little crevices. I thought that might be a problem when painting later, but it worked out fine. Getting the right colors was the hardest part of this whole project. The gold for the helmet was actually easy, got it on the first try, but the blue and brown for the pants and accents respectively was more difficult (the paint set I have doesn’t include a brown). I combined red, blue and yellow and ended up with the dark blue I ended up using for the pants. I took some of that and mixed more colors in and finally got the reddish brown. I wasn’t sure if it would look good, but it ended up being great. Oh, also, I tried using masking tape so as not to let the brown bleed onto the skin (because I didn’t intend on painting that), but as you can see, it didn’t do much good. The helmet turned out really well. I used another paintbrush and jammed it into the neck hole to get easy access while painting and then did about three coats. The color is just what I wanted. I got a little in the eyes, which sucks, but I don’t think it’s super noticeable. I did three or four coats of the brown and blue sections and eventually got a pretty good coverage. I think I might try sanding the whole figure down a little next time so the paint grabs the figure better. The only places that ended up with bad coverage were joints. I’ve got to try that super glue method that some people use. The chest…thing, was a bit of a challenge. I cut it off so it wouldn’t get too covered in paint during the process, but I was concerned that it might not reattach very well or look consistent with the straps on the back (on the back of the figure, the straps are actually attached to the figure. In the end I was able to glue it back on with super glue pretty easily and the paint looked pretty close. Customizing a figure with giant wings on its back is nice because those big bastards can cover up some mistakes of which I have quite a few. Before putting the pieces back together, I tried a new technique I remember reading about while editing a Customizing 101. The idea is to out a little paint in your paint tray and then mix in water to thin it out. Then you dip your brush in, get most of the paint off with a paper towel and then brush over the areas you want, then wiping it off. This gets the paint in the nooks and crannies, which is exactly what I was going for when I carved all those chest hairs. As I was working on the piece, though, I decided I wanted my Hawkman to look like he’d just been in a battle, so I used the black wash over the whole figure, leaving ashy marks all over his body, wings and helmet. I then popped the head back on, repaired the wings and glued the chest straps back on and was almost done. My last step was to do something similar with the leftover reddish brown paint I had but without adding water on the included shield, sword and mace. I’m really happy with how the sword, especially turned out because the Four Horsemen included little notches when the originally made these pieces and the red in there looks exactly like old blood, which is what I was going for. Also, as you can see in the top of this photo, I spilled my red paint which is incredibly frustrating because so many costumes include the color. Ah well, not a huge deal. And here you have the finished product. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. You can still see some of the red and green through the darker paint int he joints, but at least he still has his full range of motion. I think next time I customize a DCUC figure, I might try pulling apart the legs and arms to get better coverage, but we’ll see. That takes way more work and is much harder to put back together. I only realized after passing an image of the finished product to a friend that I didn’t give him the long black hair the character sported and it’s also missing that huge handheld blade he used to carry. Maybe I’ll try my hand at creating one of those using apoxie.

Who should I tackle next? I’m partial to working on 90s characters who might not get their own figures. Maybe I’ll finally start working on my Extreme Justice team of shiny, long-haired Captain Atom, Maxima, armored Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Amazing Man and the Wonder Twins in the DCUC scale (luckily a few of those figures already exist so it should be too much problem. I’ve got no idea how to do the armored guys though. Any thoughts?