Cougar (Youngblood)
What up everyone. This next figure reveal has been finished for like 3 months, but for multiple reasons, it was pushed down the list. Well today, I finally present Cougar from Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood.
Cougar was made for my good friend NewCollector. Every year we do a custom figure swap where we exchange wish lists of 5 or so characters and pick the one we want to make for the other person. In typical NewCollector/Customs by Matchu figure swap fashion, I did not know any of the options on my list. Lol. NC’s collection is full of characters from Image Comics which I am completely in the dark on. So when he sent me some options this year, it should be no surprise I was attracted to the one that looked most like Wolverine.
Cougar here was made with a relatively simple recipe. He is Puma figure with a Sunfire belt, Demogoblin hands and a Vintage Wolverine head that was modded with ears from Puma - odd that this head doesn’t have ears. I never noticed until working on this custom. Easy peasy!
I did a decent amount of sculpting on this. I had to make the chest furry because his arms and lower legs were. So I ended up resculpting the chest and abdomen and added some fur texture to the sculpt. I did the same on the lower legs. Once I did this, I felt his legs looked a little thin. I ended up having to go in and thicken up the thighs on him a touch.
Aside from building up the musculature, I had to sculpt his vest and add a bit of overhang over the shoulders. I also redid a few spots of the hair to make room for the Puma ears. And as per usual, I filled peg holes - so fun.
The belt was my biggest challenge here. In retrospect, I would have approached it differently, but live and learn I suppose. I measured where I wanted each spike to be and simply glued ends of cocktail toothpicks onto the belt. I was worried they would be brittle, but they held surprisingly well. I also would have affixed it to the body before I started painting. Instead I tried to put it back on after the paint was done. Very smart move indeed. ugh. Prob one of my more stupid decisions in the last year or so (customizing wise).
When it came time to paint, I had a blast with this guy. Most my masking came out with little to no bleed (that rarely happens with me), and dry brushing the fur sculpt was lots of fun. I also quite enjoyed the doing the face on this guy. The yelling mouth was fun and not having to do pupils always makes things easier. Lol
In the end, I was pretty satisfied with how Cougar turned out. Even better, NewCollector seemed to be pretty happy with it too, so that’s always an added bonus. I really enjoy my swaps with NC. He’s been a great friend for a quite some time now and im always happy when I get to make something for his collection of obscure characters (lol) and am even happier to have his customs in my collection too.
Up next we’re gonna finish off this All New X-Men team. Reveals coming in duos starting with Cyclops and Jean Grey and culminating with Angel and X23. Pretty stoked with how they all came together.
