My Customisation Process

I’ve made quite a few custom toys for shows now, I thought this time it might be good to document my process.
How I took this..

And turned it into this (click to see it bigger)..

First, a look at my tool set..

Sculpting

• Milliput, this is a 2 part epoxy moulding clay, any 2 part clay will do. I have heard of people using Sculpy for toy-modification, I think thats a bit stupid considering you have to heat sculpy to set it, the toy bases are made from vinyl or resin and produce toxic fumes when heated, not so good.
  Milliput acts like clay when the 2 parts are mixed, it can be smoothed with water, dries to a sanding hardness within a few hours, goes completely solid with in 24 hours and bonds to most materials.
• Sculpting tools are very useful and give you a wide range of sculped finishes that are impossible without them.

Paints

• Spray paint for large areas and undercoats.
• Acrylic paint for brushed layers, I find acrylic is the easiest paint to work with, it mixes well, dries fast and you can apply it in a variety of ways giving a wide variation of texture and tone.
• Varnish, I have Matt, Gloss and Semi-Gloss depending on the finish I’m after.

Brushes

• I have allot of bushes, from large to tiny and from good quality to really crappy. It really depends on the look you are going for as to the brush you use, some of the painting techniques I use are damaging to the brushes so poor quality brushes are fine in those cases.

Process

Obviously the first thing you have to do is work out what kind of look you are going for. For this toy there was not a massive amount of room to move because of the horns and other major features which I wanted to keep, so I decided on a demon, the hands on the toy are very well formed and I wanted to play on that, I decided that one of the hands looked as if it was holding a bowling ball and the other looked as if it was holding a cigarette or in this case a joint.
I decided that the face should be elongated with sharp exposed teeth and a slavering mouth.

Above you can see the face mostly sculpted, I ran out of fine white sculpy half way through and bought the cheaper and slightly rougher standard grey stuff.
There are no bottom teeth at the moment so that I could get in and paint its mouth.

Next came the hand objects. I made these with Sculpey, seeing as they were able to be removed from the plastic toy and heated. I moulded them in place, then carefully removed and heated them. You can see above that the skull is darker than the joint, this is because the skull is baked (and so the edges began really heating) and the joint is boiled. I would highly recommend boiling instead of baking, you get much more control, it wont burn at the edges and you can do it in the microwave.
Note, this toy has ball joints, to keep them functioning it is nesassary to keep all paint off, so at this stage they are wrapped in masking tape.

Lastly I moulded the pins. It would have been far better to make a mould to get the pins properly standardised, but I had neither the time nor materials, so I did it by hand, rolling and cutting set portions and then rolling the details in. Boiling them to harden.

After the moulding comes a bit of sanding - if its all rough, if not I don’t usually worry about it. Then the under coat, the way I paint is from dark to light, so I spray all the pieces black first.

Above I am starting the first coat of acrylic paint, because I do at least 3 coats of separate colour I can afford to be pretty rough. You can also see int this photo that I sculpted on buttons and a curve at the bottom of the shirt.

Next I painted a few coats into the mouth, finishing the tongue and most of the gum detail (using 3 coats of red and some white for details). I also painted the first couple of coats on the upper teeth.
I was then able to sculpt in the lower teeth. I set the head aside and allowed the teeth to set.

I then moved back to the body, gave the shirt a lighter coat and added black details like the collar and pocket.

Above is the head at the first stage of skin painting, its still rough at this stage, with the sculpting doing much of the detail work for me. I am always careful not to overload the brush with paint at this stage unless I am at a highlight point (those areas that you want to bring attention to).

Here I have pretty much finished the head, I have used 3 different colours for the skin areas, all with various coats depending on the area and how much it should be raised. To add extra texture to the figure I use the dry bush technique which involves loading the brush with paint and then wiping most of the paint off with a cloth. This gives a chalky effect which is really good for detailing models and works well with the sculpting, building up the defined areas.
Once I have put all the coats but the final highlight on the figure I go though and pick out the dark details with watered down black. You can see this technique in the picture above, especially on the eye with the scar. I added this detail because of a crease that had appeared in my sculpt, so instead of hiding it i excentuated it using watered down black, then a lighter yellow beside the black to give a ridged scar effect. Finally I added some white highlighting on one side to really bring the scar in focus.
I have gave the teeth a few more coats from yellow up to white as well as the eyes, I have used white sparingly to indicate isolated wet shiney areas.

Above you can see the same process on the legs and skin where there are 4 separate colours building from dark to light. Its especially apparent above the hooves and under the stomach where the dry brushed highlights bring those areas into focus.

The body is now finished, I have added 2 coats of greenish highlight to the shirt, as you can see its a highly effective way of adding shadow and detail. I have also put on red bowling shirt details, unlike the built up areas I have used a loaded wet brush for these areas of detail colour.

At the same time as I was painting the face I was also painting the skin on the arms, using the same layering technique to build up the fingers, knuckles and muscles of the arms. I then moved on to the skull and joint: the skull when from a yellow brown and built up to grey white. The paper on the joint is a few layers of white, the ash is a bit of brown and red stippling on the black base and I added in the burn details with a bit of watered down brown grey.
In the pic above the arms are sitting on what will become the bowling alley. This is a piece of plywood, I have put masking tape ove it and measured out lines for the plank details. I then cut down the lines using a metal ruler and scalpel, I pulled off every second strip of masking tape and then applied a couple of coats of dark maple coloured wood stain using a cloth. Once that dried I removed the last bits of tape and applied a watered down stain over the whole of the board. I repeated this a few times deepening the colour with each coat but still leaving the boards visible. Having cut the tape with a scalpel also created ridges in the wood which the stain settled in.
Once I was happy with the staining I painted bowling alley arrows in place and gave the board a few coats of high gloss varnish.

Above is the completed pre-varnish Devil Dog figure. I painted in his eyeballs from black to white, panting the simple black shape first, then using a small loaded brush to add red iris details and then the yellow details on top. I used more black to sharpen the pupil shape and to make a dark base for the white highlights.
To give him a bit of red-eye I painted the outside of the eye with watered down red. Finally I added pure white for the highlight areas.
Because of the amount I moulded to the head it became very front heavy, so to keep the head in a fixed position I put a double sided mounting dot on the ball joint before putting the head on.
Obviously I like my little details, so for my final touch I added some clear resin in and around the mouth to make him really look like hes slavering - yum!

Finally come the pins, I gave them a black undercoat as per usual then built up the colours. I wanted a kind of Russian doll look, a faceless corporate man protected by riot police. Above you can see the first blue coat of the riot police, the one to the left has extra details added in black over the blue.

Here is the faceless man in detail, I painted his whole body grey blue first, using the same blue for hair details. I then added the shirt white, painted in the black details and finally the red of the tie.

Above is a riot cop with a tear gas gun. For these guys I put down the blue and grey areas and then added lighter blue, black and white details.
Once all the paint was finished and dry I added a gloss acrylic varnish for a shiny finish.

And here is the end result at the show.. the pins are a bit wonky because they are held down with double sided tape (click the images for a larger view)..