Working Time	:	About ten days
Base	:	The Scorpion King ("The Mummy Returns" line)
Parts	:	A big plastic scorpion
Materials	:	Revell colors, water colors, hot Glue, "UHU Kraft" glue, Das Pronto, Kids Dough clay, acrylic spray paint, ALs, walnut shells, clear laque, tooth pics, coal dust
Points of Articulation	:	7 (6 intentional)

Character & Intent

Ah, the Scorpion King. Certainly most of you are familiar
with this character - Known from such movies as "The Mummy
Returns", "The Scorpion King" and no others, this ancient egyptian
assasin-turned-king (played by the ever-so-wordy Dwayne "The
Rock" Johnson) had the bright idea to sell his soul to the egyptian
god of death Anubis in order to survive and gain an army of super-
natural monsters to trample his enemies - So far so good.
Unfortunately, he didn't even get the chance to bask in his glory,
as he was not only transported, but also transformed into...
well.... you can see for yourself that it's not pretty.

And here's my point in making this custom - While his human
form received not one, but two action figures, the monstrous
man-scorpion that was his final fate did never receive such
treatment. A shame, it would have been a perfect project
for McFarlane or possibly the Four Horsemen...

 ...it ended up with me, instead.
What crappy fate for a king.

By the way, the one thing I'm really not satisfied with here
are his legs, especially those in front - They should be much
straighter. Of course I had to work with what I had, and there
was no way for me to make those things straighten up without
ending up a mangled mess.

Creation

To my great surprise, this custom prove to be not half as
difficult as I had thought and ended up being finished in only
about a week of time.

After aquiring the source materials, one of the first things I did
was the reconstruction of the face. As you can see from the
source pic, the original expression appeared like the reation
to particularly nasty diarrhea. I don't know if scorpions or
pharaos or pharaorpions have to deal with that, but this
one had different things to do. A combination of dremeling
and hot glue (along with new eyebrows that followed in
paint later on) changed visage to the nasty smirk he
showcases in his original CGI silver screen appearance.
During that, I realized that his hair was fairly easy to remove,
so I carefully seperated his wig from the head which is why
it didn't get in the way during the work process.

After removing the legs via boil&pop and the hands via
just pop (they were connected fairly simple, almost like
they're supposed to be interchangable), it was time to
slaughter the scorpion.

Working on the scorpion ruined three perfectly good
dremel heads, as the heat of the friction heated the glue
enough to make the head come off of the rod. (Cue
porn music here). Sure, it was annoying. Sure, it
was expensive. Sure, it was even dangerous, since
the heads flew around the room...
But the sight of a big toy scorpion with a huge,
smoking hole in it's head was well worth it.
(Hey, I've seen less impressive effects in
B-Movies)

Attaching the front legs was difficult. As you certainly
have guessed already, I took those from the side of
the scorpion's body. But how to keep them from
breaking off under the weight of the full figure ?
I drillled two holes into the base of the scorpion and
- instead of just sticking the legs in, I re-enforced the
stabilty by sticking pin-nails into the legs from the inside
(the hole in the head gave me the needed access)
and added a whole mess of hot glue. While I was
at it, I also put a vast lot of that stuff into the tail area
to balance the figure out, so it the entire weight would
not press onto the front legs.

Speaking of legs... When I got the scorpion off of ebay,
one of it's legs was missing. I took care of that problem
with the aid of tooth pics, Das Pronto,Kids Dough
Clay and more glue.

Attaching the human torso to the scorpion was
fairly simple - I just rammed the first into the latter
and sculpted around the seams.
When that had dried, I realized that I had done  it
totally wrong - The arms of the scorpion had to be
placed on the sides of the elongated torso.
Lesson Learned:
Keep a close eye at your
reference material at all times !

So, after ripping the the finished construct apart again,
I cut the scorpion's claws off and dremeled the cuts
smooth. What followed was a rather tedious process
of builing the sculpt of the mid-torso with lots of Clay
(since it gets relatively hard, and is light as well as cheap),
some Das Pronto, more hot and regular glue and several
erasers to rest the claws on so they didn't sink down and
fall off during the drying time.
I also made sure to keep the articulation of the human hip,
since there wouldn't be much poseability to the figure
without it. Since we're on the topic of ariculation...
Remember the front legs ? For reasons that remain
slightly mysterious to me, one of them ended up to
be turnable without falling off or damaging the
scuplt - Quite a nice surprise.

The triple tail turned out to be rather easy to make.
I had been lucky enough to have gotten a equally-
scaled fly figurine with the same auction I got the
scorpion from, so all I had to do was to cut two
legs from the fly, attach them to the middle tail
with more hot glue (in different angles to provi-
de for a more dynamic pose) and glue two cut
toothpics to their ends.

The claws of the human arms, however, were
a different beast to produce. Fortunately, the
wrists had a size  fairly compatible with my
AL's, so I build them up around two tips
of those. It took me a few attempts to
make them durable enough, but now
they do not only have articulation, but
are also removeable. And one of the
claws uses a walnut shell as it's base.
Somehow, that seems to make it
better. Mystical fruit powers,
I assume.

The rest was pretty much a paint job,
albeit not an easy one - All the colors
are self-mixed and I spend about three
pots of revell paint before getting the
right tone for the human skin (note:
never underestimate simple brown...)
To achieve a more organic look,
I used a lot of drybrushing of different
shades all over the figure, but especially
where the animal blends with the the
human torso. The dark spots were done
by using black spray paint from a distance.
I also applied some coal dust in several
areas,especially the claws. It doesn't
showreally clearly, but at least it adds
to the uneven feel of an organic
being.

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