how to custom make toys? materials needed?
 

anyone care to share how and where they get their materials.

I'm searching youtube for video tutorials but its very hard to find what i'm looking for.

like if your gona make a custom thunder tank what material is the bulk of the shell? metal? wood? plastic? and if its plastic how do you make it?

and for those who know how to custom make action figure faces/heads what kind of clay do you use?

and for paint how do you get those shadows within the muscle tone or show battle scorch marks?


anyone?

You could write a book based off of those questions. For building something like a Thunder tank from scratch, many people would use styrene, a plastic that comes in sheets of various thicknesses and a variety of other shapes as well.

For faces and sculpting, people use a variety of materials. Greenstuff is a popular material, but takes some practice. Sculpy is a polymer clay that many people use as well.

For the shadow effect, a popular painting technique is applying a "wash." Which is a thinned paint that is applied over the finished paint job and then wiped away, leaving the wash in all of the recesses on the figure. Another method is dry-brushing, in which you start with a darker base coat and then apply lighter coats using a paint brush that is almost dry, so that the paint is only applied to the highest parts of the figure.

I would recommend you check out some of the other action figure websites, I know hisstank.com has a bunch of great tutorials stickied in the customs forums.

Good luck.

thanks for the help, much appreciated.