Re: My Agent Venom WIP
Ok, ALL DONE! So for those who weren't here in the beginning, here is a start to finish on this figure.
Agent Venom has recently become a favorite character of mine, and I just LOVE the red/black look he has in the Thunderbolts comics. This is my first 100% custom, from concept to completion, so I'm pretty proud of this.
I started by purchasing a full Metal Boss Armored figure from a fellow Freak:
The body, suit and most of the armor was used. I then purchased a Snake Eyes head:
I then removed the goggles and used sculpting putty to fill in the breathing holes and sculpt a pair of eyes that I liked. Venom's eyes vary from one comic to another. Putty was put into the breathing holes then sanded down after it had dried. This took some doing to get it just about perfect, had to paint over to clearly see what I had, then sand again, then paint. But I pretty much got rid of the holes eventually.
Here I have all of the body armor off, in the process of painting it all flat black:
I really wanted to do the shoulder spikes. At first I tried to sculpt them, and failed miserably. They were too small to stick to the plastic, and very inconsistent. Then I went to Home Depot to look for some small nails, and ended up buying some longer, dark brass thumbtacks. The shoulder pads are a flexible plastic, so luckily I was able to easily poke one through from the back, then cut the round part off, and each one stayed in place nicely without having to be further secured. I first drew a pattern of dots on each pad using a sharpie, so I would hopefully space them nicely.
I wasn't sure how the brass would paint, so I then sprayed them with primer.
Next, I decided to use the hands and gauntlets from the HT Ghost Rider figure, because they also have nice little spikes on them. Found a fellow Freak who had a set he was willing to sell me for a nice price. Painted them the same flat black, and then added red to the eyes and edges of the shoulder pads:
Somewhere during the process, I was Googling photos of Agent Venom and came across this:
I LOVED the idea of symboite arms holding guns all around him like this. After some creative thinking and digging around the garage, I came up with a spool of bailing wire. It's skinny, but very stiff and posable. But too skinny. So then I grabbed some small shrink tubing that I had lying around (yellow) and slipped it over. Wrapped it around a gun and liked the look.
So I took a trip to the hardware store and bought three different sizes of black shrink tubing. Ended up using a medium sized tubing for the upper symboites, and a smaller size for the lower ones, just to make them different.
Probably my biggest challenge was painting the spider on his chest. I tried doing it once from scratch, and also decided to try glossy black paint on the chest armor and head, thinking it might look cool:
Turned out I hated the glossy, and as another Freak said "It looks like an ant". Sure did. So back go the drawing table. Slapped some flat black over the top of the glossy, and this time decided to cheat. I took a photo of the black armor, and then drew my spider in Photoshop. I then used that photo as a guide when painting.
I painted the spider with a skinny brush and under a magnifying glass. Then went back over the edges of the red with more flat black paint to try to clean up the lines.
There's the WIP photos, I'll post the finished product in the next post.
If you've made it this far - thanks for reading! This has been a lot of fun.