With two versions of Rise of Cobra Scarlett, and them being very different, I really wanted to try and give her a proper treatment in any customs.  Plus, let’s face it, there aren’t that many girls in this toyline and I had an extra of each Scarlett, so I wanted to give it a go. The hardest part was trying to find a way to keep her feminine while still ‘bulked up’ with the Arctic cold-weather gear.  I could have just taken the Arctic Snake Eyes and did a headswap, like I did with Ripcord (and lots of plastic-weldiness) but that would have still made her just pretty androgenous.  I wanted sleek and sexy, like she in in the other ROC incarnations (even though the City Strike one has some neck issues) but I wanted her padded-out to protect against the cold weather. This took some doin’. Basically, I had to find body parts that were smooth-ish (not too wrinkly, armoured, geared-up) so as to look like arctic gear, and I had to find ones that weren’t too big in… Read moreCustom ROC Arctic Scarlett

Before I got nutty in getting all Phone Melty and Plastic Weldy, I wanted to ease in slowly.  I did the Desert Ripcord, because that was just a headswap, handswap and painting the neck.  But, I wanted to get painty, and I’m really loving getting my City Strike crew together, so when I saw that I had two identical Jungle-coloured Heavy Duty’s (because the jungle featured so heavily in Rise of Cobra… oh wait…) and then I finally picked up the 4-pack Desert Something Something ROC with a repaint of Heavy Duty, I thought, “Hey, I frickin’ LOVE pickles!” Kidding.  I thought I should just do my own repaint, because HD isn’t my favourite from the movie line and I wasn’t afraid of fucking him up.  It’s not because he’s British, or because they did him and not Roadblock, but because they gave the toy freakyweird eyes.  Like boggly and gross.  I love the earring, but the eyes are sheepshit and scare me. But still, a good excecise and if I can get another HD in Impact Armour (because his… Read moreCustom City Strike Heavy Duty

I’ve just posted about making the attachment for the nozzle of my heat gun to “weld” an Ice Viper’s hood onto Arctic Snake Eyes’ parka to make an Arctic Ripcord.  Here’s the shots of the Ice Viper with the hood from Snake Eyes’ parka. Swaperoonie! I’ve got hoodieboy and a normal one side-by-side for comparison.  You can see that this is probably the least impressive angle as you can still see the seam on the inside of the hood.  Because of the Squeeziness Factor, I had to do the work on the hood while it was already on the Ice Viper, making it incredibly difficult to melt things together, plastic-welding styles, without melting the Ice Viper’s face too (I melted his visor a little, whoopSo yeah, the most flaws in the above. A side-on comparison, where you can still see a bit of a sharp angle between ‘old’ parka and ‘new’ parka near his face, but I’m still loving it. My favourite shot, of course, because it shows no imperfections! What’s that?  FUCK.  I see that I overlapped the black… Read moreCustom Ice Viper and Welding Plastic

The first official custom I did was Nunchuck, whom I will blog about later, but he was a Jump In With Both Feet custom, for the 4th Australian Customs Contest on the Hisstank.com forums. Now that I have time to sit and do them the way I want, making figures that I thought they should’ve made in the first damn place, I’m really quite pleased with the results. First up, Ripcord.  Now, I know there’s a floppy-hat Jungle version from the ROC (Rise of Cobra) line, but there wasn’t a whole lot of jungle mentioned in the movie, yet the desert featured heavily.  So, I took the much-too-tall Desert Duke (from one of the packs?) and popped a Ripcord head on him after painting the neck with the nearest matching brown.  The reason I phrase it that way is because one of the other Ripcord heads has a much darker shade of brown. Not that I slap on the tinfoil hat in regards to racism, but you wouldn’t really expect to see a much pinker or more Caucasian-looking Duke, nahmeen?… Read moreCustom Desert Ripcord, Arctic Ripcord and Welding Plastic