It's better than good, It's yours.

From the Workshop Part Two
Posted By Lindsay

So if you read my previous article on cleaning and repair, you're feeling pretty good.  You can take sad unloved action figures and restore them to some of their former glory.  But what if you want to take a good action figure and make it… better?

That, my friend, leads us into the grand world of customizing.  First, some definitions.

Repainting 
Exactly what it sounds like.  Using only paint to create a custom.  For example, you have one of those silver-suited Batgirls, and you'd rather she be in gray or black.  Or, I've seen a few pictures online of custom "Dagobah R2D2", which is usually a standard R2 and some brown paint.


Customizing vs. Kitbashing 
The term kitbashing comes to us from our colleagues in model trains and vehicles.  At its most simple, it means to take pieces from various model kits to make a new piece, (i.e. not what was intended by the manufacturer).  In the world of toys, it's often part of a rough continuum:

Kitbashing can cover things as simple as giving a figure a better accessory than the one he came with.  Collectors of 1/6 scale military figures do this a lot.  Take a figure from one box, clothes from another, pick up accessories here and there.  It's simple, like playing Barbies, really.  

Then there is a vague area, of Frankenstein-ing figures together.  Kitbashing and customizing are used relatively interchangeably for this.  Many of my customs are at this level, and could be called kitbashes, since I use this figure's head and this one's body and this one's hands, glue them together, some sculpting, repaint.  This will be covered in my next article.

More advanced than that are full customs, which may have little to no original toy as a base, they are mostly sculpting, up to and including fully sculpted statues.  I personally like using a base figure.  Go too far on this continuum and you may fall off of toy customizing and end up in original art (and no one wants that).

So, today's handful of projects are examples of easy customs/kitbashing. 
Simple things that I've done to improve a figure.

Terry's Batarang

The New DCUC Batman Beyond (Review here) came with a nicely sculpted batarang that was the wrong color.  No problem.  I removed the silver paint (see Acetone in the last column), and gave it a little gentle sanding to create a good base for the new paint to cling to.  After popping in an episode to double check the color scheme, I painted the small bit of plastic black and red.  I sealed it in a layer of clear drying glue to give it a harder finish which won't come off every time it goes in or out of his hand.  It's an easy change that makes the whole figure nicer.

Kitbashing: Bucky's Guns


Stupid simple.  I picked up a Bucky O'Hare figure, but he didn't come with any accessories.  I have two bins with dividers where I keep all of my extra accessories and bits, so I just looked in there for something good that would fit in his hand.  I've often handed off good accessories to deserving figures; Talia (seen above) had the Saint of Killers' gun for a good long time, and on our Lord of The Rings shelf, the 6 inch Treebeard got put together with a 2 inch scale Merry and Pippin for a great effect (see below).  I know this doesn't sound much like "customizing", but this easy kitbashing is thinking about toys and toy display in a slightly different way.  If you're reading this, you've probably already kitbashed in this sense, and so there's no need to be afraid of more…

Kitbashing: Batman's Cape

Also seen (and explained) here. 
This Batman figure became a lot better, and all I did was take apart a cheap cape and glue it to his back instead of snapping it on with an ugly neck clip.

(Sorry, no before pic)

So there you have a few examples and a few more thoughts about simple customizing, aka kitbashing.  If you have any questions, comment over at the Workshop.

Next time, transforming figures completely.