What?...customizing?.... Oh yeah, OK.

Well here I am three weeks into writing as part of the FB blog team and I've yet to broach the subject of toy customizing, thing is where do I start? There are many aspects to customizing like painting, planning, building etc so I'll tackle them in bite-sized chunks week by week. Today we'll look at a really simple way of creating your own custom, stenciling.

This isn't stencil work like you'll see Klingatron doing this is mainly just large area masking. When I do this I tend to use electrical tape. It's cheap, you can bend it easily to make curves and most importantly it doesn't bleed. The only downside is that if you leave it on the Dunny/Munny/whatever it'll eventually start to contract back to it's original shape. It should easily hold out for a day or two though.

When using tape I just use it to "draw" on the model and then use a scalpel/craft knife to neaten up anything that needs a bit of extra attention. If you design on paper first (unlike me) you can mark out some specific parts of your pattern, eye placement etc. Just make sure you refer to your drawing often as when working in 3D the design can get away from you pretty quickly and before you know it the face is skewed over to the left. When I made this I just used the ears as a point of reference.

Once you get started the design should block in pretty quickly until you've got something like this:

At this point I'll just start applying the paint. For large 18" models like this I use spray paint for a good even finish. I tend to apply in thin coats until I have the desired depth of colour. Once the paint has started to set a bit peel off the tape as carefilly as possible. Electrical tape comes off nice and easy.

Once that's done you can start to block in the details. This is quite a basic design so I'm only using black, white and grey. For the detailing I use a mixture of various brushes and paint pens.

OK, now that the basic paint job has been applied add in the finishing flourishes and generally neaten the whole piece to get it as tight as possible. I don't actually have a 100% completed photo of this but I'm sure that you get the idea.

See you all next week :D