|
Started |
: |
September 20th, 2011 |
|
Finished |
: |
October 16th, 2011 |
|
Base |
: |
Marvel Legends Super Skrull |
|
Parts |
: |
JAKKS Undertaker head (one |
|
Materials |
: |
Apoxy Sculpt, Citadel Paint |
|
Points of |
: |
~ 28 |
Character & Intent
Ah, the Undertaker. This one's gonna need a lot of prefacing.
In my youth, when I was still limber and non-balding, I was a
huge fan
of pro-wrestling and the performer known as The Undertaker in
particular.
Huge fan. Enormous fan. To an unhealthy degree. In a bad way. It
was bad.
Anyway, nowadays, this is not the case. As I have grown as a
person, my tastes
have changed - And so have my ethics. These days, I cannot look
past the rampant
xenophobia, racism, sexism, mysogyny, homophobia, jingoism,
ignorance and
sheer and utter stupidity that reigns supreme in the writing of
pro-wrestling
storytelling. And that's not even the reason why I stopped
watching it so
many years ago. The determining factor for that was the fact
that it
is also an incredibly destructive environment for the
performers.
The amount of abuse - both physical and psychological -
that these people
are expected to tolerate (and dish out) in the name of a
misplaced honor code
and work ethic is such that very few performers live to see
their 60th birthday
(many dying even before their 40th), and none are physically
intact after just
a few short years in the ring.
Entirely divorced from all that, though, is the fact that I
still like the design
aesthetic that went into the many costumes and overhauls of the
Undertaker
as a character over the past 20 years. (Some of those years less
than others)
So there was little reason for me not to attempt a design of my
own for a
custom figure of the character.
Creation
| This was a rather simple,
straight-forward built. I started out with one of the many JAKKS Undertaker heads, though I could really not tell you which one it was, since I got it from Ebay. Apart from adding X-23 hair in cut-up and adjusted form, I also modified the sculpt of the beard, since it seemed a little too sparce for my lighting. The body is all SuperSkrull except for the fingers of his right hand, which were taken from another wrestling figure. (Between my general lack of up-to-date wrestling knowledge and the thousands of part re-uses in those lines, I couldn't possibly tell you which one). The reason why I swapped out those fingers is that I really wanted to get that classic hand pose out of this thing, and SuperSkrull's hands were not capable of that. I still had to take a heat gun to the fingers to bend them juuuusssst right, though. The rest of the sculpting and paint job are rather unremarkable. There would have been a lot more to say, but I soon realized that my lofty ambitions of creating a coat and hat for him were rather misplaced given my talent and resources. Ah well. Also, in case you're wondering - I didn't add his tattoos not only because I'm not that good at painting such details, I also never found them too important to the character. |
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