#mofidied

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.

I'm done repainting and modifying (once again!) my custom pre-Rising Raiden. I feel like I have improved a tiny bit, repainting 1:6 action figures since the first time I painted him, back in 2014-ish. I am still learning, and I could have cleaned up a lot of the scratches and tiny air-bubbles that were left behind, due to me carving the features that weren't sculpted (the ones that were covered by the eye-patch and hair). They didn't bother me back then, but now I kind of regret not taking the time to look for those and only focus on fixing the terrible job I did on the eye I carved, this time.

There's always next time though! I want to fix a lot of things already. I didn't really do a great job on the ear/cyborg/mechanical-sound pieces either. So next time, I'll work on a lot of tiny and giant flaws. None of those were sculpted, they were all covered with either sculpted hair or the eye-patch, so it's all me sucking at life! DX

I am happy with how he looks taking all the flaws and putting them off for now. I still need to seal the work and dome the irises, but I had a bit of time yesterday and wanted to hurry up and finish repainting him... I didn't have time to seal the work, but I wanted to share him as he looks before I f-up the irises with the terrible doming job I do every time.

My customized, heavily modified pre-Rising Raiden, all done for now. I will eventually clean up (or attempt to!) all the tiny little flaws, scratches and other imperfections on the sculpt. That were mostly created when I carved the features on the left side, that were all covered up with hair or the eye-patch. I am not super happy, I once again f-ed up the irises due to my crappy attempts at doming them to h3ll. I created an air bubble on the left eye and didn't do an equal job on the right one, so they photograph extremely differently.

However, I will redo everything someday, so I can't say I am too angry at myself regardless. The first two photos are from my older cellphone, that takes darker photos, and the last three are my newer cell, that takes crappier but more color/shading accurate photos. I also attempted to give him a quick and crappy eye-patch for these photos, but I failed. It was a piece of scrap fabric, but I failed, nonetheless.

I want this head sculpt to go on a bust, similar to Raiden's cyborg body in the art that inspired me to mod this. I was thinking of sculpting one, but that's never happening. Maybe I can 3D print one, somehow. I am including an image of the Konami Raiden art I wanted as a figure, but never was, because the game got scrapped. I photoshopped the eye blue, because the original art has a brown eye instead -- which is not accurate, since Raiden has blue eyes. I didn't attempt the barcode and grafting on this forehead, because I haven't found any good references. I am guessing that's symmetrical, but I would rather know for certain. I know I had some images of his from Rising, without the eyepatch, but since my older computer crashed a few times, I lost a lot of older stuff. Haven't found it online yet. T__T;;