it's been 20 months or so since i began work on my first custom scratch-built action figure of Luke Cage. a good client buddy of mine commissioned me to work on a complete scratch-built figure line, and he's given me patience worth its weight in gold...or platinum...or gold-pressed latinum, for all you trekkies out there. 10 months into it, i stopped. 10 months later, i started...again. artist-types -- go figure, right? (o;

anywho, it's been good getting back in the lab and working on Cage. i've spent a good deal of time during this "second coming" to work on his headsculpt b/c of the many asymmetries i created in his face from the start. i was never able to correct them well enough, and by the end of the first half -- the first 10 months -- i had a pretty wonky-looking face. the eyes were criss-crossed, one was higher than the other; the nose was crooked (still is, decided not to push my luck on it too much); the lower lip was swollen...i could go on and on. in any case, during the second 10 months, i was creatively drained. pooped out. all i did was watch a lot of anime, movies, tv shows, cartoons, and worked. that was about it. held up in my toy cave, vegging out and just enjoying living like Seinfeld.

fast forward to a mere few weeks ago: i decided to cancel all my existing action figure toy pre-orders and virtually stopped all my toy purchases, save for an occassional 1 or 2 here and there (gotta have my plastic fix in some way, shape or form, even if it's just a fig or two). with this apparent gap in my obsession, i sought more actively to fill it w/ something, and thank goodness i rediscovered sculpting. i may have been tinkering w/ Cage a little prior to the toy order cancellations, but that action really lit a fire under me. still not quite up to the crazy-obsessive hours i put into the craft initially, but i'm certainly getting there in style. still sometimes don't feel quite like doing it, but it takes much less for me to get over that now and get going on the work. and it feels fantastic.

as i'd mentioned earlier, i've put a lot of focus on re-tweaking the HS and correcting, or at least mitigating, the asymmetries on Cage's noggin. if you look thru the gallery, you'll see various shots of Cage's head, going from alien-from-another-planet, to the black man whose Indian name would be "flat face," to old geeser Cage face, to Cage w/ Michael Jackson's wannabe nose, to finally, the new and hopefully vastly improved Cage headsculpt you see in the latest shot of him.

besides the HS, i've also resumed work on his torso, specifically his ab articulation region. pabs over at the clubhouse and the fwoosh had made a comment about a year and a half ago about this. he said if the joint was not functional, then why do it at all? well, the joint actually does work, albeit only half as well as i'd hoped it would...for now. it arches fine, but the crunch action sucks. in fact, it's virtually non-existent, and for the life of me, i cannot figure out why. fortunately, Cage can still achieve some crunch action thru his other hidden joint further below (get your head out the gutter) -- his waist joint. it's actually going to be a ball, possibly dumbell joint, and this will give him enhanced crunching motion from the non-existent motion further up top. not the most ideal, and i can hear pabs screaming blasphemy at me, but unless i can figure out where the stick-up is, it'll have to do.

the pelvic girdle also needs further modding. right now, he's really wide down there, like child-bearing wide, and that just won't do. my client wanted him to have a semblance of an ass -- nothing sexually-tilted, he just hated to see a flat ass on a brutha, it just didn't look right. unfortunately, he got a little too much junk around his trunk...and all around. no biggie, i'll just go in and slim things down, remove wax, and tweak the belt loops and the belt thickness to make it look better. aside from the pelvic sculpt, i also wanna work on the actual "mechanics" behind the pelvic girdle. at this point, i'm considering a 2-piece, front/back configuration, maybe held together w/ hidden screws. it'll take some creative engineering, but hey, that's why i got an engineering degree -- to put it to good use. (o:

in the living room at home, my pressurized paint tank awaits my return to liberate the 4 mold boxes that are held up in there...a set of elbow joints and a set of knee joints. so far, only the bottom half of the 2-part molds have been molded, so i still need to wrap up the top halves. i hope i have enough mold material b/c last time i checked, i was running low on both the silicone as well as the catalyst, and ordering more is not really an option since i don't have any extra coin in the piggy bank at the moment.

so, all in all, things are coming together once again. there's still much work to be done, but at least the journey has resumed, and i'm on the path once more.
AFR

p.s. one more thing: for more pics, check out my blog, where i babble some more to the 1 or 2 people who frequent the site...

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