Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Run Kate! Run like a Cheetah!

Yay! Got to do some customizing this weekend. I've been wanting to take a crack at fixing Kate from Lost for awhile. Long story short: She's hot....

The BifBangPow Kate was not my favorite. I've always thought the sculpt was there but the paint job was weird with mint green eyes, brown pupils and the regrettable freckles, and the hair was quite roughly modeled in comparison to the hair on the other Lost females. 


First up: Try her head on a Mattel Retro Action female body--in this case a Cheetah. It's more athletic and sexier than the Mego female. The BBP Kate as delivered is decidedly unsexy, which is criminal given the actress it's meant to portray.

The BBP head uses a neck plug while the Mattel body has a neck that the head slips onto.  
Using a sharp excato I removed the neck. just under the jawline so there's none of her original neck left. The remaining hole will slip over the Mattel neck just fine, but I did have to remove a fair amount of the hard plastic hair around the neck to get it out of the way. Same with the hair that sits on the shoulders, I had to trim it a bit to get the head to sit on the neck properly.

 

 

Okay, so far so good. It's already a huge improvement. I'm a Mego purest, but that female body is lame and always has been. Kate looks ready to go tearing through the jungle causing trouble. 


But she's not pretty yet. So next removed her paint (including the freckles which just never worked for me) and I repainted her. I think it turned out okay, eyes are hard but the eyebrows are great. I gave her pinker lips and painted the lips more full. The sculptor gave a lot of details the paint job missed. 


Now, I did do a dye dunk (see John Locke's Tanning post) on her to change her skin color to match to the body better. Eventually it worked out okay, but it was a challenge because when I removed her paint I used acetone and that seems to have interfered with the dye getting into the vinyl. It's a tad uneven, I'd like to try it on a new head sometime. I am thinking of making one with her hair tied back in a loose bun, she wears it like that a lot.

Then I really wanted to try changing her hair. This is the first time I used Magic-Sculp and it worked like a dream. I gave her fuller hair, more details, a little more curl and an asymmetrical part on one side. Evangeline Lily has some amazing hair, I tried to do it justice. 


So there she is. I think I'm in love. It's a really cool Kate figure now. 










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