Yellow Week Part 1: I am Furious at Yellow

I hate yellow.

As I begin this blog, I’m covering the central tenants of my customizing manifesto. Toy Fair, MACH-1, and now, the horrors of the color yellow.

Carl on the Fwoosh did a really great Bishop custom in 2005, seen here. As his writeup explains, he wanted to use as much of the old 5” Missile Fliers Bishop as possible, but in a six-inch scale. He did so because that toy was great. The big clunky boots and gloves had an aesthetic that Marvel Legends can’t capture today: it was manga-influenced without being Huberto-Ramos-crapped-out. But, he also did it to avoid dipping his brush into the color yellow. Check out the text: he snipped off the gloves and boots, got a belt from Cable, and then made stripes with yellow paper, which is awesome, because it’s one of the smoothest decoupage jobs I’ve seen. “Anytime I achieve yellow without having to paint it, is listed as a victory for me,” he wrote. I read that at the time and thought, “Amen, brother,” (though brother implies some continuity of talent, and I’ve got a ways to go). But back then I knew the pain of this demon pigment, and as future projects went awry, I thought of the passage often.

You can see yellow paints next to red, orange, or green paints on the shelf and never think that they conceal any shortcomings. It’s a primary color, after all, and seems just like its brethren in the pot. But brush it on and yellow refuses to form an opaque layer. It’s exceedingly transparent; I’ve had it look muddy over a white base coat. It demands several layers, to the point at which it flakes off, or more accurately, crust erodes from the mainland, as soon as joints are moved. I knew this, when I started a Jim Lee costume Jean Grey a year ago, but forgot the tenuous transparency. Or maybe I didn’t forget it, but trusted in technology to fix the issue.

Jean Grey, in her yellow-and-blue stupid 90s suit with the useless pads, is the one entry missing from our blue/gold X-teams. She’s consistently at the top of Marvel Legends request lists, but it looks like she won’t be made in 2007. In early 2006, I tried to make a Jean Grey custom myself. I actually had one before, made from a Spider-Man body with Bride-of-Venom shoulders… but it was showing it’s age, and female bases were now more plentiful, so I tried to repeat the effort with an ML6 Phoenix base. My secret weapon was Krylon Fusion. This is special spray paint, and the factor that makes it special is a chemical, which is to say, some invisible process. In the new Pynchon, he has a bit about physical and chemical processes, “As a mechanic he respected any straightforward chain of cause and effect you could see or handle, but chemical reactions like this went down in some region too far out of anyone's control, they were something you had to stand around and just let happen, which was as interesting as watching corn grow." Corn grow, paint dry, same thing. Also, fellow Pynchon readers will note that this quote is within the first 100 pages of Against the Day, which has been out for months, ergo I’ve been cutting up toys instead of reading novels.

Anyway, Krylon Fusion contains Magic Chemicals that Bond to Plastic. It’s all so seductive! This stuff sounded like dye in a can! Have you seen what these Transformers customizers do? They’re working with these engineered plastic pieces that have to rub and fold and can’t possibly take paint, so they disassemble the toy and dye the pieces to the desired color. That sounds cool! You can’t have paint rub if you haven’t used paint. But reading their information, I ran afoul at Rule One: Have one pot for dye, and one pot for food. I knew then and there that this technique wasn’t for me.

But Krylon Fusion wasn’t a die, just a paint that claimed to apply and bond and never let go. So paint must touch plastic. It stood to figure that the super-paint eschewed the normal base-coating process, which would involve putting the yellow down on white paint. So I went out and sprayed an ML Phoenix with Fusion Yellow. It didn’t work… if the paint bonded, it didn’t obscure the green underneath. I put coat after coat on there, until I had a nice solid yellow, but obtaining it took at least two millimeters of paint.

Of course, that much paint started to chip immediately. The ball hips were particularly bad. I tried to sand off the paint, reduce the plastic, and try again, but it never looked even… no, that’s too kind. It never looked anything besides awful. So the custom sat, stinking of spray paint and never completed.

Recently I revisited the scene of the crime. I cracked the torso, hips, etc of the yellow Phoenix and took a look at the paint, now so thick it was obscuring sculpting detail. I sanded it all off until I could see yellow plastic, and reassembled the figure. Ah, but this time, I spliced in the ball hips from yellow-pants himself, ML13 Pyro. Paint rub isn’t bad on most joints, but on the shoulders and hips, it’s awful. If I can find a piece that’s factory made in the desired color, it’s worth the effort of Frankenstein parts together.

Here’s Jean Grey, all assembled. The head is Sniper Wolf, my preferred Jean Grey face. The hair is the rubber Phoenix hair. The shoulder pads were originally parts of a boot, and much longer, but they’re very flexible and had a lot of surface with which to secure them to the shoulder. The yellow is all brushed on.

Since then, I’ve relearned the importance of base coats. Of course, a yellow figure gets a base coat of white primer. Next, I use a faux-yellow. I like a yellow-white, although some prefer a yellow-brown. This is the mystery of yellow, that in its pure form, it cannot coat, yet the slightest chromatic deviation will act like a normal paint. Over the white-yellow goes the actual yellow I desired, obtained with a bottle of airbrush paint. I love this stuff! Although I’m a bit hesitant to actually use it in an airbrush, because I can’t get my stream fine enough to avoid overspray. But brushed-on airbrush paint is seamless, shiny, and beautiful.

That's my dissertation on yellow. All this week I'll be working on customs that have been shaped, quite significantly, by trying to avoid painting yellow. Some others represent a triumph of the mechanical over the chemical: big swaths of yellow paint with no joint rub. I guess these will mostly be X-Men customs, because they're full of stupid yellow.