How do you make customs?

[casewindu]

over the last months i have viewed hundreds of other fan's custom minifigures with different heads made with clay and different faces and cloths made with stickers.

how i wish to do this.

could anybody give me any tips on things like:

what clay should i use?

how do i make stickers to go on faces/clothes? (without buying them off special sites)

and what tools do i need to buy?

please help. I have only painted a few clones and made a Steven Gerrard and they look very "amateuristic" if thats a real word.

Any help would be greatly appriciated ;-)

your friend michael :-)

[Axle]

I want to know too.I used name tags and drew on them for faces and torsos,but I still want to make them look....official,like casewindu is talking about.

[Starwars4J]

For all your customizing needs, you might want to check out the how-to articles at MCN.

As for clay? Try Sculpy III

Stickers? The ideal is to get someone with a good printer to print waterslide decals for you.

For more, check here

[casewindu]

For all your customizing needs, you might want to check out the how-to articles at MCN.

As for clay? Try Sculpy III

Stickers? The ideal is to get someone with a good printer to print waterslide decals for you.

For more, check here

i have a good printer but do you have to make your own decals first and if so how?

[KMOI]

Well, typically, people use some sort of image making program, mostly Photoshop. In my case, I use Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Pictureit! for all sorts of decals. If you don't have access to any of these, I've heard GIMP is a good free alternative. Though less advanced, it can do the job!

Oh, and thanks for the link StarWars! I've been searching for that water slide tutorial for eons now. Thank you so much!

[Starwars4J]

No problem, KMOI :-)

As for photoshop...I've tried it and had really bad luck. CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator are two much better alternatives

[casewindu]

i need even simpler ways now

i really dont understand a lot of this stuff

*sad*

[Zaktan of the Shadows]

Use hard clay molds and stickers.

-ZotS

[lone_buffalo]

I would try going to kinko's, if you have a laptop. They might be able to help you.

[Vader]

For sculpting the best thing to use is Green Stuff (yes that is its real name), green stuff is a putty that goes hard and wont break. You can buy it from a shop called the Games Workshop.

[lone_buffalo]

For sculpting the best thing to use is Green Stuff (yes that is its real name), green stuff is a putty that goes hard and wont break. You can buy it from a shop called the Games Workshop.

Isn't there one in Mills Mall, Aizona?

[ghoulrealm]

I've never tried to make stickers, but I do sculpt.

I use sculpey3. It is not sticky, it doesn't dry out, and remains firm when working with it.

Though it is not that durable after being baked and hardened, it is at least excelent for practicing small scale sculptures.

I believe Vader has used something called multiput

Actully i use milliput its great for molding and drys rock hard so its very difficult to break.

For sculpting the best thing to use is Green Stuff

Did you change your clay of choice?

And Lord Admiral Helden Ravensdorn uses a compond called "green stuff"

It is good for small scale and dries in air. It needs to wet while working with it and is slighty sticky, but very durable when dried.

________________

The best advice I can give you about sculpture is have patience and practice

[JINZONINGEN73]

Nuts, noone in this town carries Milliput, Green Stuff, Sculpey and my Walmart just stopped carrying Fimo (which I think was highly similar to Sculpey).

There's not even Testor's modeling putty in the toy car section anymore!

casewindu Posted Feb 24 2007, 05:09 PM

i need even simpler ways now

i really dont understand a lot of this stuff

sadnew.gif

Ok, when you make stickers for their chest and stuff, you download templates, blank minifig-sized chest shapes, from the internet.

From there, you edit it's appearance in either Paint, Photoshop, etc on your computer & print them out on sticker paper.

As was suggested, you can bring a disk with your design already made to a professional printing shop and have them do it for you, and if you want to pay more, likely on better (thin plastic?) sticky material.

As for sculpting, I only have experience with Fimo.

( http://www.maj.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=126333 )

It's good when used alone, but when you use it on plastic figures underneath, things get tricky.

Fimo, in order to get hard, must be heated up. So since you're not going to be melting your creations in an oven, you must use a heat gun from a crafts store. (Then again, minifigs are tiny, so a hair dryer might do).

It takes practice though, as it's easy to bring the underlying Lego piece (or other action figure) up to it's melting point without realizing it. ... ... ...yeah, know what? You might want to stick to a hair dryer, now that I think about it. : p

Aside from drastic, non-Lego changes such as stickers and sculpted parts, don't discount the amount of customization you can do within normal parts-swapping. If your guy needs a black hand, don't paint a yellow one. Just aquire a minifig who already has one (might need to check out Bricklink.com if it's a strange color).

In case you didn't know, a normal Lego minifig can be broken down into 9 parts:

-head

-torso

-2 arms (be gentle when removing them)

-2 hands

-hip piece

-2 legs (oh, it's a tough pull, but they do come off)

Times 9 parts by the vast amount of colors / designs each piece is available in and you have a LARGE number of possible customizations. You might find non-Lego changes weren't even needed.

As for custom capes... well, it's pretty much the same deal as with stickers.

You CAN print it up yourself, or bring it to a print shop to do in more color-staying inks.

(Even though you can buy Lego cape-like material for printers at home, the inks usually tend to suck, running at the slightest drop of moisture).

[Vader]

I believe Vader has used something called multiput

Did you change your clay of choice?

________________

The best advice I can give you about sculpture is have patience and practice

To answer your question i use both, i mainly use multiput for customs that need alot of sculpting as its far cheaper than Green Stuff. But green stuff is far better to use even if it is sticky and better detail can be made with it.