Dillon, aka ghostskull18 or ghost customs commissioned a piece from me. He unfortunately had someone else promise him the work, and after sending the figure never got it back. So I figured, what the heck I've got plenty of WIPS that'll never get done! Send it to me! lol.
No, but seriously, the project was for a young darth maul as seen in a comic. Darth Maul is ghostskull's favorite character so he wanted it done right (he was pretty particular with a few things, but hey, that's completely understandable. It's actually nice to have someone know exactly what they want!). Through the wonders of modern technology I was able to send him in real time photos of the progress and get his feedback and make adjustments accordingly. The best part, you get to see the progress too. Here's how it went down:
first I got this image as a reference:
Pretty sad little kid...
Dillon was kind enough to provide the base figure, a young Ep1 phantom menace anakin from the movie scene 3 pack "tatooine showdown"
I'll have to say... this is probably one of the worst figure's I've ever messed with. It's articulation is expectedly horrible since it's from the Ep1 offerings... but the pose that it's in was just ridiculous. It works for the movie scene, yeah ani was running away... but for a young maul I didn't think this was going to work...
but. I started giving him a hair cut anyway:
I thought at this point that this might actually work... but those arms and legs have to go. So I cracked open the torso and dug around my fodder box for some useless parts that I wouldn't be needing for any other project and came up with this:
Here's the parts run down: I completely reworked the figure. the only original parts are the torso, "skirt" part of the robes, and his head. The rest: arms from an animated jawa, highly modified waist from the same jawa (you can't see it here), "thighs" are actually the calves from a snowtrooper (the snowtrooper knees became maul's hips), the knees down are from a leigh boush.
The irony was that I kept posing him in that same stupid running "action pose" with his new articulation! here he is with a skull cap of fresh sculpy to smoth out his shave...
and using a spare maul head I had laying around I sculpted tiny horns for young maul
Once I got those done I had to come up with some ears... since I didn't think I'd be able to sculpt the detail needed in the ears I wound up cutting the ears off of an animated anakin skywalker figure and gluing them onto this little maul-strosity.
Then the figure was finished, just needed to be painted:
base coat on the clothes:
and final paint color scheme added:
then finally some weathering (although I'll be repainting over the red spots on his shirt, the "tattered" look I was going for didn't come across well and I'll be fixing that).
so there you have it. Super articulated young darth maul. I know Dillon will love it, what do you guys think?
