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The Lobstercave


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Damn! And we already have a potential Custom of the Year here! Amzing details on that Rorschach! My love for Watchmen brought me into customizing Minimates in the first place. My very first custom was a Doc Manhattan, but back then I stopped with my attemps to do Rorschach. That coat is incredible! Is it made from scratch? Back in the days I planed to use a Guy Gardner chest piece as a base, but I never started working on him.

Anyway: that custom is one of the best I've ever seen and I'm really, really looking forward to see more Watchmen!

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  • 4 weeks later...

manhattan.jpg

So here's Doctor Manhattan. Fairly simple design, but getting the right color was a challenge.

One of the first things I can remember getting me thinking about doing Watchmen 'mates was the clear blue blank DST gave out in 2008. Rather than just being a solid blue guy, I always imagined Manhattan as being a semi-translucent, energy-ish being. Because the original comic was printed before colorists started putting gradients and lens flares on everything, there aren't a whole lot of visual cues in the source art to indicate one way or another. Zach Snyder apparently agreed with me for the Watchmen movie; Mattel obviously did not. I was kind of disappointed when I got the Club Watchmen figure, both because he was solid, opaque plastic, and because the blue they picked seems way too dark. He was a very pale blue in the book, almost a tinted white, except in the scene when he darkens himself for the TV interview.

Anyway. I started with a clear blank. Actually, I started with like four clear blanks, each of which I promptly ruined by trying to RIT dye them light blue and getting them too dark or muddy looking. Switching tactics, I mixed a a satin varnish with a drop of clear blue tint and some pearlizing paint I found and sprayed a clear blank with several layers of that. The photo doesn't do it justice, but I think the effect came out perfectly. If he's backlit, he has a nice glow, but the tinted varnish doesn't let all the light through. Lit from the front, the pearlizer refracts enough light to make him look semi-solid and not completely transparent.

Painting him solid blue would have been a lot easier.

And, sorry Boyd, no Mini-wang.

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Bloody fantastic. I love the outlines and details and I think you did a great job with the base color. Doctor Manhattan was my very first custom I've ever done and I'm always very interested in how other customize him. I guess there are at least four of five of him. But this one is top notch.

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Amazing work. He looks like he stepped (transported?) right out of the comics!

And do I smell a Titania/Absorbing man combo coming up?

Edited by Nessex
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  • 3 months later...

Couple things.

As teased (way too long ago to have been a fair tease), Greithoth and Skirn, the Fear Itself alter-egos of Absorbing Man and Titania:

GriethothSkirn.jpg

These two were tough, mainly because of the "energy" runes and detail lines that are essential to their design. Normally, I prefer to do most of my customs with paint masks to avoid having to color match to printed decals or stickers. In this case, those runes were way too fine to cut masks and have them not look choppy, so most of these are decals with touch-up paint as close to color as possible. You can probably see the color isn't 100% on Skirn's chest, but this was revision 4, so it was time to put her to bed. Hammers, Greigoth's arm, and Skirn's shoulderpads are original sculpts. I was really happy with how the hammers came out.

So, yeah. Got a Nerkkod (Attuma)/Phoenix Namor set on the workbench now... smile.png

Next up, the Brothers Summers:

CyclopsHavok.jpg

There were a lot of... unsatisfying things about the Cyclops from wave 13. A lot. I always thought Cassady did a great job creating modern take on Scott's classic 80s uniform for the Astonishing run, and that mate just missed the mark for me. I do like the narrower visor from the original Cyclops mate more than the chunky wide ones from more recent releases, so I kept that and shaved off the ear domes.

Havok has another very distinctive classic costume I don't feel has been captured quite right. The first one, from wave 16, had head hoops that felt a little small, and I never liked that his mask was painted on rather than removable. TRU wave 14 Havok had the removable mask I wanted, but the hoops were sculpted solid, so they just looked like weird fins. So I dremelled out a mask to have the face straps in the right position, and used some styrene to make the hoops.

Edited by Lobsterman
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