Miscellaneous Gallery - Final Faction
Last Updated: 6/21/22
Sea Brute added.
Back to Kitbashes.
Final Faction (link may
decay) is a Dollar Tree exclusive action figure line, which does quite
well given their budget. One place the budget is skimpy is on paints, and since
the figures are held together by screws and only have five points of articulation,
they're easy to repaint. The line is meant to evoke 1980s action figure lines,
with clear Good Military versus Evil Aliens sides, like G.I. Joe versus the
Tyrannids or something. There's a cartoon a comic, so a lot of people are
repainting their figures to match the canon. I prefer to be inspired by the
canon and diverge in places.
Alpha Team is the multinational Earth defense force, your basic G.I.Joe team of
specialists, but they flesh out their numbers with bots instead of nameless Grunts.
The Kharn are aliens whose ship crashed on the Moon some time ago and they went
into stasis sleep until a cometary impact reactivated their ship systems. They seek
to steal Earth's resources for vague Alien Invader sort of reasons. They're heavy
into biotech, and in addition to bipedal drones they also have insectile swarmers.
- Krepitus Repaint: An alien bounty hunter who works for the evil
Kharn, I dunno if he was frozen with them or showed up recently. One of the
problems with the figure is that his "Flea" companion won't stay on his shoulder.
I considered just doing a simple fix, but ended up going whole hog with magnetizing
Flea and repainting everything. I went high gloss on the grounds that he's a slimy
customer. I used a lot of Color Shift paint on the metallic bits, and noticed while
painting that a lot of ornaments on the figure were molded but not painted, so I fixed
that deficiency. April 2022.
- Amari Repaint: One of the second "season" of Alpha Team
recruits. In addition to fully repainting this, I reshaped the hands with a
hair dryer in the hopes that she could continue holding her weapon (I also did
this with the stock version, but it slowly opened back up...maybe the paint will help
hold it in shape on this one?). While I mostly made the colors a little more
realistic (her father's Air Force jacket would probably not have been gold lame
unless the Air Force changes a LOT in the future), I deliberately added in the
Barn Red to be a little toyetic, especially on her weapon. I quite like how I
got a Samuel L. Jackson Glare expression. May 2022.
- Just the head - I finished this first, although after
taking this picture I did do a little tweaking, such as putting gloss seal on her
eyes and lips.
- Front View - As with Krepitus, I decided to get two and
keep one more or less stock. They're standing on old GIJoe stands (I got a bag full
of 'em in the 90s and still have most of the bag unused).
- a href=Amari2.JPG>Right Side - You can really see how badly the stock figure
holds her weapon. You can also see here how I used a Sharpie to add the molded hair
detail on her scalp, it looks better under low lighting...Sharpie ink gets an off-color
glare.
- Rear View
- Left Side - I decided against trying to add the white stripes
to the flag.
- No-Mohawk Amari - A friend asked for a no-hawk Amari, and
I sanded off most of the hair before finding that a Dremel polishing head really works
well to polish the soft plastic used on her head.
- A.C.R.M. as RM-79 GM - The card art on the ACRM reminded me of
a GM's head, and the general design is very Gundam-influenced, so I got a spare to
paint up as GM. I decided to keep it toyetic with minimal shading, just using dark
gray wash on the various (and extensive!) battle damage bits. The rifle came from
my old bag of random guns, and the shield came from a RM-79 GM model kit that had
a choice of two shields (but I repainted the spare, which was in desert color,
perhaps a 008th Mobile Suit Team thing). The backpack is from the ACRM's own
accessory pack, but along with the gun dyed black. The result is pretty paintlocked,
especially in the legs. May 2022.
- Killface (Frisky Dingo) from Final Faction
Kharn Drone: Mostly just white primer and white gloss with a little detail work for
the eyes. Scale-wise, the Kharn leader would be better, but he has a lot of bone
accessories on him. May 2022.
- Shift repaint: Like Amari, I mainly took the official
art as inspiration but also tried to pay attention to the molded detail. I considered
bobbing her hair (which was poorly glued on and popped off easily) but the sculpt does
not favor that sort of modification. So I just bent it back while heated to give a
little more room. I used a Dremel polishing head to make her face a little more
angular. Note, while Amari can stand on a GIJoe peg-stand, Shift has smaller sockets
in her toes and can't. I decided against trying to paint the swords, because the way
the sheaths work would strip the paint off anyway. May 2022.
- Master Sergeant Steadfast: This cyborg leads Alpha Team and bakes
a mean plate of cookies. I initially thought the molded detail on his throat was supposed
to be his shirt under the armor vest, but now I think it's more likely more cybernetic
replacement (he has a perfectly normal voice in the cartoon, though). I dyed the cyborg
arm black before painting, so that if the paint scraped off the palm of the hand it would
still be dark. And, of course, I made him a tray of fresh out of the oven cookies as an
extra accessory. May 2022.
- Dye test on Turret missiles -
A local friend dislikes safety orange, so asked me to try dyeing the missiles. I used
this as an excuse to try out Rit Dyemore again, and even adding the accelerant from iPoly
(which probably includes acetone) it wasn't as good as iPoly. I did try Dyemore on a
Shapeways basic white piece, and did get better results
after adding a little acetone as suggested by people on the Final Faction facebook page.
May 2022.
- Sergeant Ruck: Heavy weapons expert and apparently minefield tapdancing
enthusiast to judge by all the pockmarks in his armored boots. Nothing too fancy on this
one, mostly kept the intended stock colors from the card art, but got rid of all the
Transformers Siege style silver splatter battle damage. May 2022.
- Paint flex test on Dragonfliy wings -
One concern with the new rubbery accessory packs was that paint might flake off, so I decided
to test some paints. At least these colors worked fine, no cracking or flaking, even though
I didn't prime or even wash off the wings before painting (a.k.a. worst possible conditions).
A second test run with what I considered the paints most
likely to crack still turned out fine. May 2022.
- P-131 as Robotech Destroid or Battletech Warhammer - Sure, the Mech isn't digitigrade, but
with the head removed the P-131 is definitely evocative of the old design. After deciding that
the box cover of my 3e Battletech rules wasn't a good enough reference, I dug out an old
Matchbox Robotech Destroid (to which I may have somewhat randomly added decals). May 2022.
- "Mikey-gusari" - One of the complaints about
"The Mikey" in Shift's blade weapon pack is that the "chain" has only three links, all of them
awkwardly large. I could have made a proper set of nunchucks out of this, but I decided to
go with a longer chain and make the weapon into a manriki-gusari instead. Jewelry crafting
bits were left over from another project. May 2022.
- Kat Anders - A character who started as a Legion of Net.Heroes character who
could turn into a robot, and whose basic look I've reused sooooo many times in MMOs on top of
how many variants of her showed up in LNH and Superguy fiction. For this version, I decided to
keep a variant of the "comes from a future where robots run a world with very few humans left" but
make it more Terminator-type sinister. I built her from a first run Shift (with the hair and head
a single piece, it made modifying the hair easier) and painted the pistols and rocket pack a bit.
While I kept Shift above close to her comics model, it's pretty clear that the mold intended for
there to be a cleavage window there, so I kept that for Kat to further distinguish the two. In
addition to giving the figure a new hair style, I carved the knife off the right forearm.
May 2022.
- Various views
- File Card - I made the template in Excel and pasted in a picture
after making sure it had the right proportions (197 pixels wide by 224 pixels high). I got the
official-looking background by the simple trick of holding a weapon set card behind the figure
to get the appropriate pattern. Unfortunately, up close under strong lights the somewhat mottled
nature of the paint job became REALLY obvious, so I used a blur tool on her face to reduce the effect
a little. (Excel template posted to the Final Faction facebook group, can be emailed on request.)
- Glued Steel Dragonfly Pack - Not only does
glue keep the pack from falling apart, it makes it a lot easier to get the rubbery peg into
Steel's back socket. This picture shows where to glue (and where not to glue). June 2022.
- Magma Diabol - Sure, I could've tried repainting the torso and head to match the color of
the limbs and then touched things up, but if I'm gonna paint this big guy, I'm going all out.
After priming and basing in white, I went over the figure in a mix of apricot orange and
red-orange paint just randomly swirled together, then put bright yellow (slightly watered down)
in the recesses and dark red on the high points. I surrounded the non-magma bits with
purple outlines to simulate the "visual purple" effect one gets from looking at actual magma.
June 2022.
- Churro and FD-0 Mechsuit - I was originally going to go with a more comics/cartoon accurate
color scheme, but I liked the 1970s-ish faux antique effect I got with the base layer. June 2022.
- X4 Turret mods - Like FD-0, the turret is glued together rather than screwed together, but
there's enough space around the "hip" joints to allow for painting without needing to break the
glued pegs holding the quadpod base together. I dyed the entire thing black so that joints would
be less obvious, at least, and dyed the missiles black in the same way as shown above. The plug-in
cannons were taken from the Cyborg Pack, cut apart and with 3mm rods inserted (others have done
3D printed cannons that look even better, but I wanted to see how far I could get with just Final
Faction pieces and basic connections). The missiles can still be fired. June 2022.
- Sea Brute - The Kharn Brute has a sort of sea creature vibe to it, so I decided that to go
along with Magma Diabol I'd make a Sea Brute, with the spiny bits being coral. To make it look
even more watery in person, I used an acrylic water medium (for dioramas) as a sealant.
June 2022.
