Well, THAT Figures!

I figured it was time to post this stuff...

Figures, as opposed to mechanical things such as spaceships, aircraft and so on, are not my main “forté" but I have been called upon to do some occasionally. When I do, I find them a fun diversion from the usual things I build. Having just posted the “Mr. Spock” article, it reminded me of all the figure kits I have also built over the years, pretty much exclusively for Round 2 as they have been re-popping a lot of ancient kits for nostalgic reasons. So I figured I may as well post some of that past work here and now. “Content”, you know?

The thing to note about all of these is that for figure kits, the assembly is pretty much a no-brainer. Often you don’t even need the instructions as it’s obvious where everything goes. They tend to be pretty simple, as there aren’t a lot of mechanical greeblies to deal with. Just gluing them together and cleaning up seams is pretty much all that needs to be done for the most part. But the real work is in the painting. With figure kits, many painting techniques are often used due to the variances of colour to create depth, texture and shadow and the sheer number of colours that are used. This can be both frustrating… trying to figure out what techniques to use and what the thing should look like… and a heck of a lot of fun at the same time!

For the paint work, everything from spraying main parts using off-the-shelf rattle cans to airbrushing to hand painting with enamel hobby paints and acrylic craft paints to washes and wipes and drybrushing and also using various coloured chalks to impart depth and texture. Whatever works to achieve the right effect that pops up in my nerdy brain is used. Nothing is verboten as long as it looks good.

But I must put forth a little caveat as you look through the following. Most of these figures look absolutely ridiculous! Not realistic or fantastic. Some are absolutely cringe worthy! But don’t blame that on me. My job was to take the plastic kits (most of them from the 1960s and ‘70s when a lot of people were smoking too much pot and getting off on various hallucinogenic styles) and make them look as good as I could by assembling them stock with no modifications. Some are very toylike with moving parts and action features that detract from them being more…. well.. realistic, so take them for what you will, and remember that I did not design these things! ;-)

The figure of King Kong at the top of this page is the most “serious” of the figures on this page. It’s an excellent sculpt by Round 2 that comes very close to looking like the Willis O’Brien stop motion animated 18” puppet from the 1933 classic movie. The paint job I did for this resin kit was used to show the Chinese factory what the finished model was to look like and used as a guide to make the pre-painted kit that was released a decade ago as of this writing.

This first example is a “glo-heads” set of kits that… well… you can form your own conclusions. Typical 70s type of thing. Round 2 re-popped these a number of years ago. Nostalgia and all that. These were made from glow in the dark plastic, but of course that would be boring to show on the box tops so I was instructed to paint them interestingly. Pretty crazy, eh?

Next up is a “witch” kit that is really wacky but pretty nicely detailed. The first picture shows what it looks like in a normal environment. The second picture was taken to look as dramatic as possible, and I achieved that by placing a couple of LEDs hidden behind the crock pot to cast eerie shadows and dramatic lighting. The flames were painted with fluorescent paint and made to “pop” using ultraviolet light cast upon the model just out of camera range. Pay close attention to the bottles on the ground and on the butcher’s table. Those turned out remarkably realistic and were done simply by tinting and dullcoating the clear parts to look like dusty old witches’ brew ingredients..

Here is a “Bigfoot” character which is obviously way over-the-top silly, ridiculous, and a direct result of 1970s hype. It’s a cave-man type character that was likely designed in a board room full of hippies smoking bongs at the company back then. The kit was made with some glow in the dark parts, apparently including some sort of radioactive puddle, that would have appealed to teenage kids hoping to be in the aforementioned board room at the time. I brought those features to life using ultraviolet lights during photography.

Next up, the “Alien” from the classic 1979 film.
Although very much an uninspiring pose (it was criticized for being really boring), the MPC kit, released the same year, nevertheless does an excellent job of mimicking the character as seen in the film. The alien, which was seen only in very quick cuts and heavily obscured by shadow, was actually portrayed by a very tall and thin man (Bolaji Badejo) whom the director met entirely by coincidence in a bar and offered him the job of portraying the creature. This kit, despite the pose with just moveable arms at the shoulders, is nevertheless very accurate to what the actor looked like in the rubber suit designed by H.R. Giger. Subsequent kits from various companies made more dramatic examples of the Alien, but oddly, this particular kit does the best job of showing what the actual man-in-the-suit really looked like as filmed for the 1979 classic! Thus it can be considered possibly the most accurate representation of the creature ever produced. Yep. No kidding.

OK what will I show next?

Let’s try this set of skeleton type figures which are re-pops of old 1970s Disney "action” kits that had toy-like features such as rubber band activated moving parts. They were re-popped as the “Jolly Roger” series in 2019 under the Lindberg brand.

These kits had many optional parts and features that gave some play value for kids at the time. When round 2 released them, they did so with seriously impressive box art that utilized the photographs I shot of the buildups I did for them. Here are some pictures of a more candid look at the buildups used.

This fellow’s “action feature” was a rubber band (not shown) powered lifting mechanism which comically pulled the skeletal arm off the poor comrade he was trying to rescue from the quicksand.

This victim of an alligator attack uses his sword to chop at the giant reptile emerging what would likely be a pond or some such thing which is why the legs disappear into the display surface.

Below is a dead captain commanding his Raft of the Medusa to a bitter end. This particular model actually won first prize at a local contest before I shipped it off to Round 2!

This one had a swappable head that could be a regular “human” version or a skeleton version.

I have no idea what this guy’s trying to do. I really don’t. But his parrot companion is apparently trying to talk him out of it.

You can let your imagination tell the story of what’s going on here. Optional parts shown on the beach. The swashbuckling wooden legged Ahab and the skeletal treasure guard are simply stolen from similar kits pictured above to save on costs I guess. Make a new base, use the same figures, paint them different and they look different to make a different kit… until you notice the obvious.

Next up is one from a “Haunted Mansion” series with action features similar to the ones above. Here an unsuspecting organist gets a Halloween surprise from his mummy... who’s really just a dummy.

Here are some dinosaurs. The lava is just fluorescent paint made to look more ominous through the use of ultraviolet light.

And finally, a couple of famous Japanese monsters. You may know them. Booby no-prize if you don’t.

Gosh, that’s really long tail suspended by wires you’ve got there Mr. man-in-a-cheesy-rubber-suit!

That’s a sample of some of the figure kits I’ve built and painted over the last few years. I’ve done more than that but some I never took any “beauty” pictures of and aren’t really all that presentable. Maybe I’ll show the rest some other time as a “behind the scenes” feature. If I get enough comments on this post I’ll consider it.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoyed the show posted here. Please subscribe to this page so you can be notified of more fun later on.

Have fun! ;-)