Finally…March-sters of the Universe!

My regular followers will have noticed a lack of recent content on my blog, for which I apologise.

Unfortunately, my computer has finally given up the ghost and the funds at the Crow’s Nest are not currently sufficient to replace it. However, not being one to give up in the face of adversity and being somewhat cunning, I have worked out that I can upload the photos from my ‘phone via the WordPress App as a Draft post, then  edit the post via a plug-in keyboard attached to my Fire tablet…

Hopefully, this should work, so you’ll have to excuse any roughness as I get used to updating my blog in this fashion.

So, as noted above March is He-Month 3 or “March-sters of the Universe”, where Roger Webb of Rantings from Under the Wargames Table and myself attempt to create 28mm versions of characters from the Masters of the Universe franchise. Follow the above link to see how Roger is progressing, as he’s been regularly posting since the beginning of March and is doing rather well…

When I last posted, all I’d done was state that these were the figures I was intending on using:

So, from left to right we have Drax, Lex Luthor and Doc Samson, all from Heroclix. As previously guessed by Roger, Drax will become Trap Jaw and Lex Luthor will become Man-E-Faces. However, Roger failed to guess that Doc Samson is intended to become Tri-klops…

Whilst I’ve always liked Trap Jaw as a character, the representations of him so far have been a little…rubbish. So my challenge was to not only make my version of him, but also make him cool. Trap Jaw screams cybernetic space pirate to me, so that’s how I’m approaching him.

So, I first removed the lower blade on Drax’s ‘cutlass’ and his right arm. This was replaced with an arm from a GW ‘womble’ space marine, from which I’d cut away the actual arm, leaving the shoulder pad and bolter. And this is what I ended up with.

For Man-E-Faces, I added a GW Laspistol to his right hand, then built up his helmet using Milliput, topping this off with an offcut of plastic sprue for the top. And this is what I ended up with.

And for Tri-klops, I cut off Doc Samson’s right hand and the top half of his head. The hand was replaced one sourced from a Heroscape Tarn Viking, as this had the right type of sword. And this is where it gets really cunning, as I knew that I didn’t stand any chance of re-creating his visor with my sculpting skills, but I could find a shirt button of the right size and glue this to the top of his head, which was then topped off with another sprue offcut. As I always felt Tri-klops was a little bit ‘ronin’, I decided to give him a dangly skirt, rather than the standard hairy pants. And this is how he came out.

Looks a little bit Mexican, like Zorro’s pulled his hat down over his eyes… However, as it came out exactly as I intended, I’m pretty happy.

I had a little Milliput over when I’d finished basing them, so not liking waste, fiddled about with it for a bit, then stuck it on a flight stand and voila! Another ghost for Ghostbusters…

Now, the problem I had before was that once I’d undercoated in white, people couldn’t actually see the figures as the characters, as shown when I created Beast Man from a Bugbear. So, I decided to slap some base colours on each figure, to see if this helped…

Trap Jaw

I’m trying to decide whether I give him ‘tattoos’ on his head,similar to how some pirates had skulls tattooed on their face, in place of an actual cybernetic jaw and skullcap. what does everyone think?

Man-E-Faces:

And Tri-Klops:

So, hopefully worth the wait. I’m pretty pleased with how they look so far.

Comments and feedback appreciated.