Yondu (Classic Guardians of the Galaxy)

Hey everyone. Time for another reveal. He was made for a figure swap and I have only shown one picture of this next guy in his completed form and I am pretty excited to be able to share him finally. Here is Yondu in all his classic blue and red glory. 

As I mentioned, Yondu was on a list of 6 other characters including Arcade, Stegron, Armor, Man Wolf and more. He was made for my friend Omar of Omarali Customs. This is the second figure swap we’ve done together. We do ours a bit differently, we allow each other to see our progress on each others figures up until its the painting stage. So I was able to share Yondu on Instagram as I was piecing him together and sculpting, but once he was primed, no more sharing. 

Originally, I wanted to use the Bucky Cap body for Yondu. I felt it was the best representation of his appearance in the comics. Unfortunately, the lack of butterfly joints made his cool archery poses pretty lacklustre and awkward, if not impossible. I opted to use a Sunfire base body instead. The butterfly joints allowed me to hit all the poses I wanted to hit. 

Here is the recipe I used to make Yondu. As I said before, I started with a Sunfire base body with Wolverine feet, buccaneer boot tops from Red Guardian, X-Men Deadpool lower arms with hands from X-Men Deadpool, Spider Man and Captain America. The head is a cast of Daken, the quiver from a Hawkeye Figure (heavily modified) and the bow was from a fodder trade I did a while back with another customizer, so I’m not actually sure where it comes from. My guess would be lord of the rings or something like that. 

I did quite a bit of sculpting on this bad boy, all of which was done with Apoxie Sculpt with the exception of the Mohawk. I decided to use Procreate for the mohawk because it is a bit more flexible/durable. The band on the right wrist and bicep were both sculpted, as were all the details on the left arm. I also did the straps across the chest, the giant belt and secured the buccaneer boot tops to the boot swivel. Also, filled all the peg holes as per usual. 

The paint job was tons of fun on this one. I was very happy with the color palette I got to use on Yondu. The blues were popping. The reds were popping! The yellows… you guessed it… poppin’! Woo! Throw some gold highlights in there and it really all comes together. I also tried a new method for shading on the figure, which I think worked very well. Might still be a bit too subtle, but that should be an easy fix next time I use it.

After I was finished painting Yondu, I was so excited to share pics of him with my friends. I was even more excited to get it out to Omar ASAP so he could finally see it and give me his thoughts. I’m pretty sure he liked it? haha. He took this last picture ill leave you with in his traditional low light style that he executes so well (could be better quality, I had to save it off Instagram heh). Thank you all for stopping by and checking out my latest reveal. Coming up next, the last piece of my 90’s X-Factor puzzle, Polaris. Stay tuned!