Digi-Fusion Shoutmon Project

I recently purchased the entire first wave of the new Digimon action figure line, called Digi-Fusions. They're a pretty fun line to play around with, as all of their parts can be swapped around with the other figures to make new creations, or digivolutions from the show, such as Shoutmon X4 and MetalGreymon. The most fun aspect of the line though is that Digimon figures are back in stores! As a big fan of Digimon, and even bigger fan of the toys, I've been waiting to see this ever since their last release in 2004. Here's hoping the line does well!

Anyways, as fun as the toys were, I still had a few issues with the production of some parts of them. For instance, many of the pieces are nearly hollow, and make for a very light weight and cheap looking figure. Some of these hollow parts are neccesary for the "fusion" ability, but most are not. Therefore, I decided to "customize" some of the figures and try to make them just a bit better.

I am starting off with Shoutmon, just to try things out and see if I even have the skills to do this. I've repainted action figures like Transformers before, but I've yet to venture out into full-blown modifications, even as simple as these may be.

I used a combination of three types of putty/clay, being the Milliput Epoxy Putty, and Mr. Hobby Dissolving Putty. I began though with some simple Air-Dry Clay bought from Wal-Mart. I used this to fill the most of the holes on the figure itself. After this dried, I went over the top of it with a bit of dissolving putty just to seal it in there, and finally placed the epoxy putty over that.

The epoxy putty dries very hard and can be sanded down to be smooth. Any little knicks or imperfections in the sanded epoxy putty can then be fixed with just a bit more of the dissolving putty.

Although it kind of looks like a mess in the picture, the arm piece here is actually extremely smooth, just as the pre-molded plastic is. Putting a bit of primer and paint on this will (hopefully) make it look like it was originally produced this way.

I have about half of the pieces to the figure completed now, and I've been working at it for about a week. Most of the time is spent applying putty, waiting for it to dry, sanding, and repeating the process until you have a nice clean piece. I've also only been working on it sparingly in my spare time so it's going a bit slower than it could because of that as well.

And incase anyone's wondering, I'm using 400 grit sandpaper to start out the sanding, and moving to 600 grit to finish it up and smooth everything out nicely. I hope to get more work on this guy done soon, but honestly I have no clue when I'll get him completed (especially the painting part). Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later though.