WIP: Modern Polaris

X-Men Month continues with a WIP of Polaris in her costume from the Brubaker/Tan run of Uncanny X-Men, currently ongoing.

I think Psylocke is just about the perfect female ML. The posability is great, the sculpt is good, and the whole thing is carried off without much in the way of sculpted detail. Toy Biz never reused this mold, and Hasbro doesn’t seem to have plans to, but it’s a great vanilla figure from head to toe. So I popped it into my Polaris project, based on seeing other customs doing pretty much the same thing, and noticing the nice match between the Psylocke face and Billy Tan’s art.

There’s some sculpted detail here, but it’s all pretty simple. I did a boot design, some gauntlets, and her costume straps. Polaris has a bodice thing, unlike Psylocke, so I cut the area out of an Emma Frost, dremeled it thin, and glued it on (using modeling compound to make the join). I could have sculpted the whole bit, but I just didn’t feel like it. By the by, I want to say a bit on the subject of sculpting bosoms. Back on the old RTM Customize list, nobody wanted to be the first person to do it and get labeled as an Toy Pervert. I remember Bill Burns did an excellent Kingdom Come Powergirl, and his write-up was something along the lines of, “I added, on the chest, you know, because the character, she’s… tee hee!” And the rest of us sat back and drank to his bravery. But that time of innocence has past, and now forums like the Fwooshnet are full of Bagley Black Cats, more clay than plastic, they are! I’m going to dance deftly into Toy Pervert/Erik Larsen territory, and declare it positive progress. Aren’t we trying to replicate our source art?

Anyway, I didn’t want to sculpt a woman’s chest, that’s kind of weird; so I sawed off a bodice and glued it on.

Polaris seems to have a Hair Pile going on… it’s not a beehive or a beauffant, which would be really cool if it was still possible to see hair like that and think Night Girl and not Marge Simpson. Is there an Imperial Guard analogue for Night Girl? Right now the figure is unsanded and unpainted, except that I popped off the legs, threw on some green, then popped them back on for the WIP shot. They might have to come off again to paint behind the hip balls. I love being able to disassemble the figure to paint the crevices.