NeoKnight Rapture

from Spawn figure "Angela"

There was a lot of "kibble" to remove from this toy, and not all of it went gently into that good scrap pile. Many of the pieces were secured with both glue and pegs, and the peg holes had to be filled in. The most obnoxious hole was a big slot in the figure's forehead where the headpiece was secured. I filled that in with Pro-Doh (Play Doh's abortive attempt at capturing an older audience, you can find it on clearance racks) and the other holes with structural paint.

The next step involved cutting things, including (accidentally) myself. As you can see, Angela has one huge boot and one skintight boot, but Rapture has two leather boots. (Oh, as a side note, the actual Angela toy didn't have anywhere near as much detail painted on it as the picture to the left shows.) So I carved the large boot down to size with an X-Acto (well, I started with a pocketknife, but after slicing my thumb open decided to get an X-Acto) and built the other boot up with structural paint. Then I took the big shoulder pads that I'd removed and cut/sanded them down to size, attempting to make them symmetric (Todd McFarlane seems to have a beef with bilateral symmetry). Next I build up her hair and the front of her costume with more structural paint. The costume buildup was because Rapture's top isn't totally skintight, and the bra-less Angela's front implied skintight costume. Next, because I knew I'd never get the paint to stay on elbows and knees if they were allowed to bend, I glued those joints straight and added structural paint to fill in the cracks. Finally, I did a lot of sanding and slicing to get details to work better.

Now, Rapture has a jetpack, so I built one out of the same plastic conduits I used for Jetfire's thrusters (see the Hooligan-into-Jetfire page) and painted it silver. I tried to build a clip onto the back of the figure so that the jetpack would be a removable accessory, but my attempts failed, so I settled for building up a flat area between the figure's shoulderblades for later attaching the jetpack.

With the structural work done, it was time for the painting. The coloring of Rapture's costume was very inconsistent in the comic, so I decided to stick with what was used on the cover of Transformers #73. In the process of painting, I found a few of my structural elements had flaws, and added bits to her costume to compensate. The Pro-Doh forehead absorbed paint differently and stood out, so I turned that area into a headband. And a fleck of structural paint down in the figure's cleavage would be too difficult to remove without damaging other areas nearby, so I painted a pendant over it. Additionally, the figure's gloves couldn't be completely modified, so I painted the hand straps red to match the rest of the gloves. For the hair, I painted it solid brown, then drybrushed on black and later more brown to give a more realistic look. Unfortunately, this shows up on the scans as black hair. Oops. When all of this was done, I glued the jetpack on and sprayed the whole thing with clearcoat.