Dopppleganger

What up everyone? Today’s reveal is a fun one because for the first time, I have collaborated with another customizer. Here he is, the menacing Doppleganger... errrs (plural) built by myself and painted by the insanely talented Poundz (@iam978customs), 

I decided to keep Doppleganger on my ‘to do’ list after seeing Hasbro’s very sad attempt at him. Knowing that an undersized, under articulated, Doppleganger would never be sufficient for my personal collection, I decided I would make him but I absolutely did not want to paint him. I figured a paintjob by Matchu would prob take this figure from a 7/10 to a 4/10. Fine detailing, like weblines, are hardly my strength. But when faced with such a dilemma, who else would a guy turn to than the king of weblines, Poundz. 

When I approached Poundz with the question, I originally asked if I could commission him to paint my figure. But once we got to chatting, we decided that I would build not one, but two Dopplegangers, and he would paint them both. I was so stoked for the opportunity for many reasons, getting a dope Doppleganger figure, collaborating on a figure (had never done that before), and getting a piece of art from a fellow customizer who I am a huge fan of and have always had a lot of respect for. It was a perfect win for me. 

Once I received the parts from Poundz, I began piecing the Doppleduo together. While I have built a multi armed figure before (Forearm), I had never had to get 6 arms onto one torso (not to mention a rather small torso). There were a lot of challenges with this. I didn’t want to do the normal, which is simply making a hole in the sides and plugging the shoulders in. When the shoulders aren’t sunken in, they just don’t look natural. 

I ended up using my Dremel to remove the lower portion of the upper torso (all the way to the wall of the mold where it sits on the lower torso.) I then built it back up using apoxie sculpt and some shoulder sockets I made from thinning down some butterfly joints from some Pizza Spidey bodies. Once I got the sockets into the proper placement, I used superglue and apoxie sculpt to anchor them in place and fill in the gaps around the sockets to blend it into the torso. Once I fit all the arms back onto the torso, I was pretty happy with the results. 

The other time consuming part of this project was the hands and feet. Resculpting one pair of hands is already a pain in the ass. Resculpting 6 pairs of hands was very labouring. Each hand had 3 sessions of sculpt on it. One to build it up, one to detail it, one to fine tune all the details after sanding. I started with a piece of paper clip I cut to size and insert into the stump hands so I could give support to the potentially brittle fingers. Feet were shaped with my Dremel and then sculpted into the exact look I was going for. 

The head was another little challenge I had. I struggled to get nice looking, uniform Spider eyes, and proper placement of the jaws.  Once I did get the eyes right, I pressed a piece of a mesh bag from a bundle of oranges into the eyes to give it the fly like look. Its subtle but you can see it on both of the figures  if you look closely. The teeth are just small spikes of apoxie sculpt that I glued into place, then sculpted a lip of sorts over the bases to hide them. 

Once I had a functioning, assembled Doppleganger, I packed them up and shipped them out to Massachusetts for Pounds to work his magic on. Upon arrival, he started working on them pretty quickly. He was very open to my thoughts (not that I had anything at all bad to say about what he was doing, but I wanted a few things that he didn’t do on his like weblines on the elbows and silver eyes.) I also wanted a darker color scheme as I liked Doppleganger being darker shades of reds and blues from my main spider in my display. But I won’t lie, once I got both these guys back in hand, the brighter reds and blues REALLY pop in person, I almost felt like I chose the wrong color scheme. Almost. Lol

As you can see, the paint job on these customs are immaculate. IMMACULATE. And I don’t care if this just sounds like me praising a fellow customizer, because it is fully deserved. The paint job on this figure nears perfection. It far exceeds anything Hasbro has ever provided us. The weblines are smooth and consistent. Literally every. Single. One. Its amazingly well detailed. Poundz has the hands of a surgeon - still and precise. If anyone ever has the opportunity to own a piece from him, you’d be foolish not to take him up on it. His work is flawless. 

If you cant tell from the last paragraph, I am over the moon with how these Doppledudes turned out. Working with another customizer was a great experience and Poundz was such a pleasure to work with. His craft is top of class and he’s a super nice dude to boot. Many nights we would share WIP pics back and forth of the project and go off on random convos about other things as we got to know each other a bit better. It was a lot of fun. I hope I have another reason to get some weblines in my life because working with him again would be a real treat. Ive always wanted to build a new body for Spider Ham… hmmmm.

Please head over to Poundz Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/Poundz978 - give him a subscribe and some likes where you are there) and check out his video reviews he has done on both these figures before he sent them back to me (I had to fix the legs on his as they were super loose and I wanted to take pics of both :)) You can also follow along with his work on Instagram at @iam978customs.

Thanks again to Poundz for the collab and to all of who have been tracking the progress of this project throughout the entire process. Up next… Samurai stoner rabbits? weird…