WIP: Astonishing Beast

X-Men month continues with Beast in his Astonishing X-Men design.

I sat down the other night and started applying paint before I realized I had forgotten to take WIP pictures. Oh well… if you want to see what the WIP looked like, check out other Astonishing Beast customs on Fwooshnet, like this one by Ryno, or this one by AlphaAttorney. I copied these customs wholesale, because they’re good looking and relatively simple.

This custom is inaccurate to John Cassady’s art in several aspects: the head is less hairy than Cassady draws, he has hands rather than paws, and there are probably some other aspects I’ve forgotten. But at the end of the day, I can’t get excited about Cat Beast. He was okay when Frank Quietly drew him, with the hulking upper body, the weird feline legs, and an ascot to top everything off. Cassady returned us to a primate body, and has Hank hanging off ceilings… when we saw the Astonishing look drawn by other artists, it wasn’t clear whether or not Beast was returning to his traditional form. Anyway, Cassady draws a hybrid of ape and cat, and Whedon continues to use the mutation as a plot element… but I’d rather have the pre-Quietly Beast.

Anyway, after voicing my disdain, I still want a blue cat lurking behind the other Astonishing crew on my shelf. After all, by fall 2007, Hasbro and ToyBiz will have released the rest of the cast. So I made an approximated Astonishing Beast. I think of it as another artist, like someone doing an Annual, doing a take on the design.

The base is, of course, the Cat-Head Stealth Beast released by ToyBiz. The upper chest, upper arms, and legs have sculpted hair. The waist, shoulders, and back sculpts use a dremel to cut hair lines into the plastic. I didn’t know if this technique would yield good results, but I really liked what I saw resulting from my scratching into plastic, and ended up doing this “negative sculpting” on the back just to save time.