Archive for the ‘Vinyl’ Category
Eyezon is probably the most recognizable of the Max Toy Company creations. The back story is that Eyezon is a giant mutated potato, now bent on destruction (obviously). This was the unpainted Glow in the Dark (GID) release, painted by me to look like Eyezon right after mutating. The colors are more ‘natural’ earthy potato colors for the body, along with yellows and greens for the arms and legs to look like potato sprouts, with the magenta tips to the growth characteristic of potatoes. I had alot of fun painting this big guy up, and he still glows awesomely thanks to some subtlety and transparency to the colors!
Glow shots have arrived!
My first Real X Head custom! RxH is one of the premier Japanese designer vinyl companies, made from the ground up by Mori, the owner and creative genius behind the designs. I like the sculpts of the RxH figures alot, but there are so many colorways to chose from at this point that I’ve only picked up a few production pieces. To get most of the sculpts, I instead opted to snag an entire peach flesh set to do with as I pleased, including a couple extra of the Bigaro sculpt, seen here, to practice on.
This figure is designed as a tribute to Tetsujin-28, known in the US as Gigantor, one of the original animated giant robots from way back in the late 1960’s. I love the classic muted blue of Gigantor, with its small splashes of color for trim. The yellow 28s on the arms are a nod to the later redesigned T-28, which had big yellow stenciled 28s on its forearms. I had originally airbrushed the eye, but my aim is not true enough yet, and my yellow paint was not the best mix, so I colored back over all of that and hand painted the eye area. Big thanks to my friend Sanjeev for his tip on how to ‘fake’ metallic colors with a thin silver coat over all the non-metallic colors! I had drawn up the ideas for this guy, and managed to paint the entire figure from start to finish in an evening. It still amazes me how much I can get done now with the airbrush! The ‘cape’ is painted to look like T-28’s distinctive jet-pack flame. When I was taking the photos, something dawned on me as well: the gold-mist Bigaro makes a perfect Black Ox stand-in! Watch as Bigantor copies some moves he saw in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen!
Pics of my shelves seem to have become pretty popular, so here’s an update including much better pics of my vinyl shelves, and the bottom shelf totally redone with my TF big-guns in anticipation of some new stuff coming! Right now I’m loving the Max Toy Co and glow display on my nightstand.
OK, photos came out better in a little less light so we’re good!
This is the insect-kaiju Gumos, sculpted by Dream Rockets, released in unpainted green vinyl as part of the Battle Pack with Max Toy Co’s unpainted flesh Captain Maxx, used for my Maxx-vell custom. This is the first kaiju I airbrushed, and it was very different from doing Maxx-vell. The colors were applied much more roughly, and free-handed, rather than the handpainting and masking and shading of Captain Maxx. I used a dark green to shade the sculpt, a light green to highlight it, and used the awesome green of the vinyl for the midtones. Browns and reds for the spines/spikes, and yellow greens for the claws. The eyes were a bit of an experiment, and I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. I painted the eyes a very dark silver, and then applied dots of much lighter (GW Mithril) silver in a semi-organized pattern. I then applied Tamiya Clear Red in a few thin coats, topped off with some Future for shininess, in an attempt to represent iridescent segmented compound insect eyes.
Here’s a teaser shot for the Gumos kaiju I finished the other day, the second member of the Max Toy Co and Dream Rockets collaborative Battle Pack I purchased, which came with the unpainted flesh Captain Maxx, and an unpainted green Gumos. I’ve gotta take some better photos of Gumos before I upload anything, as my fluorescent lighting washed out all the shading and made most of the figure look unpainted.
Finished photos of Captain Maxx-vel, besides from painting the inner head. Airbrush compressor showed up the other day and worked like a charm! The blue guy in the fight scene is the Max Toy Co Alien Xam GID, painted by Deadpreisdents to look like Alien Baltan, and the pink guy is the Pachi Summit MTC Drazoran.
Captain Maxx is the original creation of Mark Nagata, founder of Max Toy Co, as a combination of his love of Ultraman and his son Max. Since his initial release a few years ago, Captain Maxx has developed a small menagerie of fantastically original enemy Kaiju. An unpainted flesh Captain Maxx was released in a Battle Pack with an unpainted Gumos insect kaiju, and the set was one of my first major vinyl purchases. I couldn’t decide which of the available Captain Maxx figures I liked best, so I decided to get the unpainted figure and make my own! When I saw the Captain Maxx design, the Ultraman influence was apparent, but my first thought was ‘Captain Mar-vell’. The figure reminds me of Captain Mar-vell (from Marvel Comics, not DC’s Shazam!) original Kree battle suit, which he wore in his early comic career. Mar-vell Maxx here is also the first figure I have used my new airbrush on… I did the initial base coat with the brush, and then the highlighting of the base suit color (I went for a mintier base color than the pale in the comics). I had a good time doing the fine highlighting on the light color, but could not replicate the results on the darker green yet… I am using Cel-Vinyl paint from the company Cartoon Color, and it sprays well, but works best at low pressure for the fine point way I use the airbrush. Right now all I have is canned air, which has poor pressure regulation… the only reason I was able to get the results I got the first time was because the can was freezing over and running out of air, so I am working on picking out a compressor so I can start using the airbrush more. The figure is shiny right now because it has multiple coats of Future on it as I finish sections, so that I can do any hand painting work without risking messing up anything airbrushed. I’m going to add highlighting to the dark green sections, as well as some other details and hand paint the Kree planet logo on his chest in another green so it stands out.
Marmit is one of the leading modern vinyl kaiju manufacturers today. The Sky Deviler is a design from the stage troupe Big Battel from what I understand, out of Boston. I bought the purple vinyl with green spray colorway the other day. The claws and eye and top pincers were flat colors, and kind of bland, and the eye was not painted too cleanly. I decided to make all the teeth and claws bone colored, instead of the flat silver they were before. I’m still waiting for parts for my airbrush, so everything here is hand painted with acrylics. I did alot of layering on the teeth and claws to get the bone texture down, and then added some cavities and whatnot to them. I Used some reddish colors to blend in where the claws grow out of, as well as redoing the lips on the big sucker mouth, around the eye, and in what I decided were gills on the front of the monster. The eye was done using a picture online for reference, and I used yellow for the iris so it would stand out against the other colors on the figure.
My current shelf setup… a combination of real robots in scale and the vintage super robots I’ve been accumulating lately, along with some vinyls and vintage Transformers.
Just messing around with some various things that have come in on a lazy Saturday morning before work… I went to wrok on a big model the other day and found that my spray-gun’s air hose was broken, so I’m spinning my wheels until the replacement hose shows up, and since I was ordering I ended up buying the Badger 200-20 single-action fine detail airbrush, which works just like the spray gun, and hopefully will open a number of new techniques to me once I get a handle on it!
Prometheus Rising Studios 