I customized a warriors mini! Process below the cut :)
I ended up with a duplicate Yellowfang mini on my first two pulls-- what are the odds? Its a super cute design, and I really love how much personality the minis have, but I don't need more than one... so I decided to try customizing! I've never done it before, but I really wanted to give it a shot. There aren't a ton of cats in the series that would be suited to this mold, so it was easy to pick the iconic book 1 villian, Brokenstar, as my design!
I wanted to change up the silhouette of the character a little bit so that the paint wouldn't need to do all the work in making it a distinct character. An easy place to start was adjusting the tail. Brokenstar's most recognizable trait is his broken tail, so I figured that by rotating it, I could put it at an angle that would make it look broken! I was surprised by how easy the tail was to seperate from the rest of the model-- I didn't have to break any plastic, there was just some glue holding it in place that gave way with gradual, firm pressure. I suspect I could've gotten the head off too with some work, but didn't feel like pushing my luck.
Once the tail was off, I used a dremmel tool to sand down the glue and part of the tail to really emphasize the "broken" look!
I decided to make some minor changes to the body as well to further distinguish the shape-- I used my dremmel to remove the fang, as well as a couple small tufts of fur! I probably could have pushed things a lot further, but this is my first time ever customizing something, and I knew it would be really disheartening for me if I messed it up, so I stayed on the safe side this time-- I'd love to try pushing a future model further though!
One of the most important changes I made was adding scars to the face, from when Yellowfang blinds Brokenstar. I decided to make use of the two scars already on the face by following the same direction and extending them on one side-- this also meant I didn't have to worry about sanding them away! I added additional scars using a jewelry file. It was pretty tedious, but I think it came out great!
Finally, I sanded off the eye decals with some sandpaper-- it would probably have been better to do this with nail polish remover, but I didn't have any on hand and didn't want to kill my momentum. Once all my mods were done, I reattached the tail with some Crazy Glue-- wish I'd waited until after painting though, it would've been way easier!
I painted the model black to have an even base to start from-- I see now why most folks start from gray instead, building color on a black base with paint took a while!
I gave Brokenstar very dark brown fur, and I chose to actually buy this color of acrylic paint rather than mix it myself, because I dont have a lot of painting experience and wasn't confident I'd be able to mix the same shade multiple times!
Next were the lighter areas of fur, eyes, and face stripes! I definitely made some smudges and imperfections with the light paint, but was confident I could paint over them at the end.
Next up, scars, body stripes and pupils. I made sure to sketch out a design for the body stripes on paper before adding it to the model! I made some tweaks while painting but kept the same base. I wanted something simple and bold, and I think it came out really nice.
Finishing touches! I went back and added some yellow around the pupils after looking at the Yellowfang mini. I added catch lights to the eyes, cleaned up some of my paint mistakes, and added a coat of glossy mod podge to the eyes to make them shiny.
Overall I'm super proud of how this project came out, I think he looks great and fits well with the rest of the characters! Now I want to get more duplicates so I can make more customs!
