Sunday, March 22, 2015

Attack on Titan / My Little Pony mash-up!



This is one of my favorite custom My Little Pony creations thus far. For anyone who hasn’t seen  Attack on Titan, it is a Japanese anime (based on a manga) in which the human race has taken refuge within enormous walls, built to protect themselves from enormous man-eating giants (the titular titans.) I enjoyed the first season of the anime, but don’t recommend it for anyone under the age of at least 12, as it is rather violent and gorey.

This pony was inspired by one of the more frightening encounters in the series during which our hero Eren Yeager attacks the biggest titan to ever be encountered, the “Colossal Titan.”

Image credit http://operationrainfall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Attack-on-Titan-Eren-and-Colossal-Titan.png
As you can see, the Colossal Titan is a huge and imposing monster! To recreate this character in pony form, I chose one of the Generation 3 “Styling Size” ponies, specifically Rainbow Dash. This is what she would have looked like out of the box:

The pony I used looked no where near as nice as this one. Mine was a frizzy-haired, stained mess! The G3 styling size ponies are a nice, heavy toy that stands up well to any customizing (and play) and is easy to work with. For the Eren figure, I wanted something proportionately smaller, so I went with a Friendship is Magic My Little Pony blind-bag “Apple Jack” figure.

image credit http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/NjkyWDkyMg==/z/~7sAAOSwq7JT1IrS/$_35.JPG

The Colossal pony’s features were sculpted with Apoxie Sculpt, as it cured to a rock hard material without baking. Lots of people bake custom ponies sculpted with Sculpey, but this never seemed like a good idea to me, and Sculpey is too fragile to stand up to the flex of a vinyl figure beneath it.
Eren’s 3D maneuvering devices were also made of Apoxie Sculpt and I used flattened aluminum wire for his sword blades.
A close up of Eren's gear

Both figures were painted with acrylic paint, and Eren is suspended by vinyl coated copper wire that was drilled and epoxy glued into his back, then fed down into the Colossal’s front leg through a hole in its back.
There is a tiny blood-splash where the wire / spear pierces the titan's shoulder


This pony is for sale, but I do love the attention that it brings to our table at shows! It is a great conversation starter. So many people think it is just a skinned pony (eww!) until we start talking about it. Here are some more pics:









And here is the Colossal pony enjoying his debut at the 2014 Boston Comic Con!

Even this huge crowd couldn't intimidate this titan! ROAR!
Any suggestions for my next giant-sized custom pony? I have about 4 more of the large styling sized ponies laying around! 

2 comments:

  1. So cool!!! How about the 3 storms from Big Trouble in Little China?

    ReplyDelete