| MARISSA
FAIREBORN
PROJECT #250
CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
BASE FIGURES: GRIEVING GABRIELLE (XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS);
AGENT DANA SCULLEY (X-FILES)
MATERIALS USED: SCULPEY MODELING COMPOUND
FIRST APPEARANCE: "FIVE FACES OF DARKNESS" PART 3 (THE
TRANSFORMERS)
"You know, of course, that I can take care
of myself."
Preamble: Marissa Faireborn was introduced
during the third season as a representative of Earth Defense Command, an
organization which shared the responsibility of protecting Earth from the
Decepticons in the not-so-distant future of 2006. Marissa appeared
in nearly as many episodes as Spike Witwicky during the third season, and
did so in a far more prominent role, effectively replacing him as the human
liaison to the Autobots. (Which is fine by me, since she was far easier
on the eyes. Mrrr-row.) Anyway, I've been collecting action figures
here and there to turn into various humans from the Transformers universe,
and I finally decided it was time to make that Marissa Faireborn figure I've
been planning for years.
Construction: The Gabrielle figure I used
for the project came with a cloth outfit, but she was practically nude
underneath, which made her ideal to construct Marissa's form-fitting outfit.
(Marissa actually went through three uniforms during the course of
the show, but I wanted the figure to have her standard EDC uniform.) The
toy had unnatural-looking arms that were designed for a weapon-slashing gimmick,
though, so I swapped them with the arms from the Agent Dana Sculley figure
(previously considered as a base figure for this project). To resculpt
the surface of the mostly-naked figure and create the illusion that she was
actually wearing clothing, I added a very thin layer of Sculpey to the surface
in various places, smoothing it out to blend with the contours of the figure,
and then creating grooves in the surface with my hobby knife to create the
natural creases in the outfit. The pockets on the sides of her arms
and legs, as well as those circular things on her legs (which I assume are
air hose connectors or something), are also made from Sculpey.
The hair was kind of tricky. Gabrielle didn't
have the hairstyle I was looking for, so I briefly flirted with the idea
of doing a hair transplant from another figure that was designed a slightly
different scale, but eventually realized this wasn't going to work. Then
I tried grafting Sculpey to Gabrielle's hair so I could try to restyle it,
but this made the hair look huge, so I quickly abandoned the idea in favor
of sculpting it from scratch. After realizing I wasn't going to be
able to make decent-looking hair just by molding the clay to the right shape
and then carving out the details, I decided to go with a different approach
and literally built her hair from the roots up, laying it down one strand
at a time. I ended up starting over a couple of times before I was
satisfied with the way it turned out.
In painting the figure, I laid down the base coat
first and then went back to add the detailing. Some of the details,
like the insignia on her chest and the stripes on her boots, were sculpted
in advance, while others, like the EDC insignia on her shoulder, are entirely
hand-painted.
Comments: I'm very pleased with this figure,
especially considering the two major disasters that almost befell the project.
The first was when I accidentally left her head in the oven for 15
minutes. Remarkably, she survived. At another stage during the
project, baking her upper body halves caused them to warp slightly, no longer
fitting together properly. I had to do a little whittling around the
edges to get them back into the right shape, using putty to fill in the gaps
after I glued her back together.
Additional
Photos:
base figures used for the project
completed sculpt
(unpainted)
completed base coat |
 |
