Cyclops & Jean Grey (All New X-Men)

What’s up everyone. Thanks for coming back and sorry for the delay. Ive been resetting (and cleaning) my 13 figure shelves in my collection (new pics coming to my site very soon!). Anyways, continuing with my All New X-Men roster, here are the next 2 entries, team leaders, Jean Grey and Cyclops.

For those of you not following, this team of X-Men have been on my custom to do list for as long as ive been customizing (over 5 years!) And after all this time, I’m so stoked to be able to cross them off that list and have them present on my shelves. Ok onto the figures…

Jean was made using a mixture of pieces that utilize the female teenager buck (in this case it was Spider Girl body with Ms Marvel lower arms) with a head from the Stepford Cuckcoos and the hair piece from a Ms Marvel. Both sets of hands also came from the Stepford’s. 

When it came to Scott, I wanted him to have butterfly joints to allow better range of motion for his optic blast poses. I wanted his torso to look a bit more fit than the rest of his team mates. I decided to utilize the arms and legs from the male teenager buck but I swapped out the torso for one borrowed from Superior Spider Man. I had to modify the shoulder pegs to make them compatible with the Superior torso but for the sake of variety on the bucks, I figured it was worth it. He has a variety of hands from a couple Miles Morales figures (both the most recent and the old old dark days of hasbro version) and I even made him a visor pointer hand. 

I did all my sculpting on these two using Aves Apoxie Sculpt and they have SO much detail on them (check the WIP pics below - you’ll also notice lots of pics of X23 and Angel from this team too!) I thought it would be a good idea to work on 4 customs at once. It turns out, I was incorrect. :) 

I contemplated painting on the suit details but ultimately thought it would look better if they were sculpted. Plus I figured sculpted details would be easier to mask when it came time to paint. Because many of the details are layered, I had to stretch many of these areas out into multiple sculpt sessions. It also didn’t help that almost every piece of both figures (except for the hands) have sculpted details on them.

Painting something as complicated (design wise) as this with an airbrush can be very challenging. Lots of time spent on masking (my favourite!), and applying multiple thin coats of paint on the figures. Also lots of time spent cleaning up my sloppy masking too lol. But in the end, the colours turned out nice and vibrant and im stoked with how they look together with Beast and Iceman (and Angel and X23 too). 

While im happy with how Jean turned out, I do get frustrated utilizing the teenage female buck. The ankle joints are very thin and fragile and the legs are in need of some serious support as they bow like crazy. I do like how she looks, just frustrating to pose. 

In regards to Scott, I feel he is the weakest of the whole group. While I love the butterfly joints, I feel the Superior Spidey torso ultimate does the opposite of what I wanted it to do. Slim seems undersized and tiny compared to Iceman and Angel and in retrospect I wish I would have just used the teenage male buck torso like I did for Warren and Bobby. 

Regardless of their flaws, I am happy to finally have them on my shelf and I cant wait to share my group pics of the whole team on the next update which I hope to do in 2-3 weeks. Life has been busy and is about to get busier for me but I hope to stay on top of things so stick around!