Happy Weekend. First one back and I've reacclimatized myself to life back home.. or more accurately, accepted the fact I'm now back to my old job of cook/chauffeur/homework enforcer.
Haven't really unpacked the goodies, and quite honestly I'll be surprised if I manage to catch up on all my backlog by the end of 2023. But hey, it's what happens when you have life to deal with outside of Cyberspace. I do like to finish off things at a time, however, and the updated Black Widows are a relatively small subset that just required a stupid amount of time to take photographs because I like them JUST right.. .and so, here we go!
In addition to the Civil War head, my artist friend also got two more done for me this time around - the Winter Soldier head, and the Endgame head, both inferior to the Civil War head, but things got noticeably worse with the introduction of the Endgame sculpt the subsequent releases, which were made worse with the sculpted hair.
Starting with the Winter Soldier head, the aim was actually pretty simple - just better replicate the actual hair colour and framing of the face . The actual face itself is pretty much a lost cause with the dead stare that pretty much only works if you want an angry looking Black Widow. Accuracy is pretty typical, certainly not going to win any awards in my book for accuracy.
The artist, knowing I'm quite particular, heavily involved my input so basically if my hands weren't completely useless, this is pretty much what I would have done for myself. I guess compared to the on screen version, the draping isn't quite perfect and of course the hair isn't curved inward, but these were all experimental pieces and I was paying using chocolates, so from that perspective I'm quite happy with how things worked out. The framing in particular not only reduced the forehead, but also the general width of the face, which was a problem on the original sculpt as they really didn't put enough hair on the head.
Never even bothered to try to get the Winter Soldier suit onto the Worldbox body. One of my first attempts at making a Black Widow with curves years ago involved a Winter Soldier figure and let me say once that suit goes on, it's never coming off. If by some miracle you got the suit off intact, well, it's so tight it would never fit on anything but the stock body. But, I did have a pretty good alternative - the Solo suit that I experimented on. This is actually I actually stuffed the body into and made some notes that would eventually result in a much better Snowsuit experience, mostly bra stuffing techniques and most importantly, actually getting the Solo suit boots, which featured a proper ankle joint
For the final one (for now), an interesting art experiment more so than a true glow up. A friend got rid of his Endgame Widow and knowing that I could at least get the suit on a body, I figured "why not?". So yeah, as mentioned, my least favourite Hot Toys sculpt, followed by the Snowsuit sculpt. While the Solo movie sculpts lacked that accuracy compared to Civil War, at least they generally got the facial structure of Scarlett Johansson right. Endgame looked like a really bad digital de-age. My artist friend did not possess the skills (yet) to do the braiding correctly, which was fine by me. I really didn't need to have that particular look, and opted for a simpler hair style so practice on the colouring part could be done instead. We settled on Natasha's casual look when she was having the teleconference with Captain Marvel trying to determine where Thanos was, which had her hair down.
The red is indeed more vibrant than her natural colour, but being an experiment I just let her go wild and use whatever red dye she had on hand. At the end of the day, I'd say visually this is a very distinctive look that isn't likely to be replicated by any rooters out there. You can see in my photos that while the quality of the face is better, this sculpt really doesn't look that human any more, a massive disappointment to me because you figure the worst they should have done was take the Infinity War head (which was the Civil War head) and add sculpted hair to that.
So of the three suits, the Endgame suit SHOULD have been the one to turn out the best, as the entire suit is pliable rubber AND black which hides the joint lines much better than the Snowsuit. But, despite having a torso that was pre moulded to accept a more prominent bust, I still couldn't quite get it right. Also, the Endgame suit didn't come with jointed boots, which make standing the figure a bit of a pain. There you have it. From inception to completion, about a year. My creations are certainly not perfect, but they at least have curves in most of the right places. Who knows.. maybe someone will finally release a body where all the curves are in the right laces. I think by that time, I'll be ready to attempt Version 2.0 of all these suited bodies to make things even more accurate.
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