I am working on my traditionally sculpted, resin cast 1:6 scale head sculpt of Raiden by Thai artist numoworkshop. I purchased the head sculpt back in 2014-ish, from his shop on eb6y. I had already modified it since I purchased it, because I am not a fan of painting sculpted hair. I also prefer my toys to have "real" hair, unless they have extremely short hair, which most of the characters I love don't have. I heavily modified it back then, but I always felt that I had a long way to go, before I could call it done or close enough.
However, knowing that I am much older now, I repainted him first to see just how much of a sh1tty job I did the first time. DX That is the first image to the left; I didn't even seal the work and thought "nope," so I wiped it clean and I'm starting from the mods now. Which is the image on the right. I still need to do some more sanding and probably need to add more Apoxie on the right eye to make both as symmetrical as possible, as Raiden is perfect that way... lol!
If it's not oblivious from the second photo, which has the shot of how the sculpt looked straight from the artist. I removed all the sculpted hair, I carved the ear/audio cyborg pieces out of some of the sculpted hair, then sculpted some of the details that weren't there due to the obvious sculpted hair covering those. I carved the left eye out of the eyepatch/band on Raiden's left that was sculpted instead, and of course I didn't do half a decent job, because I suck! Those were the heaviest mods I've done, all at "once" (not literally, they took me quite a few days. Just waiting for the Apoxie Sculpt to dry takes a day, or so..) without first painting and seeing what else I need to change. I feel I did a super lousy job due to that. However, I don't regret it this time. I feel I always do slower mods, so I don't regret the crapfest later. However, this time, with this sculpt, I didn't want to have a custom Rising Raiden, with sculpted hair and a covered left eye.
Because I did pre-order and still own the Hot Toys Metal Gear Rising Raiden, but that one took a bit longer than a year to release. I feel like he was announced sometime in early 2014-ish. He was delayed a few times, if I am not mistaken. I got mine from Japan, so it was as early as possible, unlike getting it from a USA retailer and still got to me until August 2015. I knew I wanted an alternative head sculpt that was closer to the Rising that never was, which was supposed to be developed by Kojima, but then it was not to be created, and Rising was developed by Platinum. Which I don't hate, but did miss the opportunity, to get any figures based on that specific Raiden key art (which had brown eyes instead of blue ones, and that also irked me, but then it never happened anyway!). Not like Raiden is so popular anyway, there would have probably been no figures based on that key art regardless, but I still wanted to have a custom one, so I got this head for that reason alone.
End of mega long rant, just to share my progress, of this head sculpt I purchased more than a decade ago and kept in my closet along with my other resin dolls, so that I could feel they were being kept from aging too badly. I should be working on my other giant resin head sculpts first, but I feel this dude has waited long enough (and I love Raiden, I really need more figures based on him. Too bad no other MGS fans share my lonely Raiden fangirl dreams T__T;;.). (:
