Started	:	March 2007
Finished	:	May 9th, 2007
Base	:	JAKKS Ruthless Aggression 7 Randy Orton
Parts	:	Hulk 2003 movie Hulk feet, one lower leg, one fist
Materials	:	Apoxy Sculpt, Glues, Citadel Paint, revell acrylic paint, a plastic prick, a latex glove, a balloon
Points of Articulation	:	~ 16 (if you're generous)

Character & Intent

Do I really need to say anything about the Incredible Hulk ? Everybody in the west
(Or at least everybody looking at custom action figures online) knows
the character or at least one of his various media incarnations.

My motivation for this custom was rather simple, as well - Ever since I saw the
headsculpt of JAKKS' Ruthless Aggression 7 Randy Orton, I was convinced
that he looked like Bruce Banner halfway-transformed into the Hulk. And thus,
I had to make it so, for I am compulsive-obsessive. Or something like that. Go
away, the voices don't like you.

As far as the final result is concerned, I have mixed feelings about it. Some of the
blending and techniques I tried out turned out to be rather effective, but the look
isn't perfect and bad planning made it impossible to have the figure stand upright
in all but one leg stance (Hulk crash !) Still, I'm fairly satisfied and he fits my shelf.

 Creation

This is going to be a short one...

In the beginning, poor Randy-to-be-Bruce lost a hand, both feet and a shin.
Not entirely inappropriate, as that would make most people pretty angry once
they're over the shock.
I'd like to note that for the first time in what I believe to be years, this figure got to
keep the original plastic head, rather than getting a resin duplicate. Simply because
I couldn't get a good cast of the headsculpt. But I don't think that I would've gotten
a lot of re-use out of it, anyway.

The feet, shin and left hand obviously came from a Movie Hulk (Which I had purchased
pre-broken on Ebay years ago). I cut Orton's female joint part (who just laughed ?) from
his shin and glued it onto Hulk's. I also used the joint part of his left foot, but this one
was embedded into a pile of Apoxy Sculpt that formed the "ripped shoe" part of the Hulk
foot, wich I had cut apart and discarded the middle part of.
The Hulk hand was outfitted with a plastic peg made from a cheese prick cut to fit the
forearm plug. I sculpted over the entire forearm to make give it a thickness somewhere
in between the builts of the original figures.

I also sculpted over a few random muscles of the Orton body in order to give the illusion
of the growing body of the Hulk, most prominently his right thigh and left calf.

Speaking of which, I achieved the more or less kinda somewhat convincing illusion of
torn pants by gluing pieces of a regular ballon on in a stretched manner and slitting them
open (plus a few manually-cut bits and pieces). The edges of those patches were sculpted
over with Apoxy to make them blend in smoothly. I applied the same techniques with
the bottoms of the pant legs and most of the torn shirt, which partially also consists of
a disposable latex glove.

Another small addition to the torso were strategically placed blobs of glue to
form nipples, since JAKKS seems to think that pro-wrestlers are no mammals.

Finally, the paint job was nothing remarkable. The skin was painted in regular caucasian
skin tones and then modified with several washes and brushes with various ammounts
of green mixed into the skin tone. For better or worse, it definitely shows. The rest was
the usual painting effort (Although the flexible parts certainly were tricky)

As a final word on this custom, I'd only like to say...
Why the heck did that take me so long ?!

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