Making Antony, Ant-Man's flying ant!

Inspired by Marvel's "Ant-Man" movie, I decided to make custom pony versions of Ant-Man and his steed, Antony. Although these characters have been in comic books, I chose to model the figures off of the movie versions, as seen here:

These characters are ©Marvel

This project ended up being rather complicated! Antony started life as a very shabby looking 2005 Styling Size Rainbow Dash My Little Pony, very similar to this one:

It's interesting how much Rainbow Dash has changed over the years!

One of the first big challenges was giving her six legs. Although that's not completely necessary for a custom like this (for example, I have seen many butterfly custom ponies with only four legs) I really wanted to make this pony as ant-like as possible. Since Hasbro has long stopped the production of this model, there is a finite supply of G3 Styling Sized figures in the world. Therefore, rather than chopping up another pony just for the legs, I decided to fabricate them from scratch. 

I began by drilling holes into the sides of the pony, feeding a length of coat hanger wire through the pony and securing it with epoxy. I then used aluminum foil to build up the bulk of the legs, and covered them with a skin of Smooth-On's Free Form Sculpt epoxy clay. 

The large abdomen area was done in a very similar fashion.  Free-Form Sculpt tends to slump a little when used over large areas, so I needed to sand the pony quite a bit to get a nice smooth finish on the legs. 

I like to sand outside when I can. Talk about proper ventilation!

There was also a bit of experimentation in this piece. I toyed with the idea of sculpting segments into the legs, to give it a real insect look. The effect wasn't what I had hoped for, so I ended up scratching the idea. This led to more patching and re-sanding, but experimenting is part of the fun!

The sculpted joints that I ended up taking off. 

I added pincers to the mouth and segmented antennae to the forehead, both using a similar method to the attachment for the wings, except that the antennae are removable to shipping purposes. As a cool feature, the saddle on the back has a magnet built into it that will allow Ant-Man to cling to the saddle (I will demonstrate this in a later post!) I nearly forgot to take a picture before I started painting...

Here you can see the rescultping and sanding I did on the joints of the legs.

The painting process consisted of many, many coats of thin acrylic paint. I use multiple coats to minimize brush strokes (there aren't really any) and get the smoothest possible finish. Here you can see the dark brown base coat in process:

Normally, I would have liked to have used an airbrush for this paint job. However, after moving a few years ago, I still can't find my airbrush. It was an extremely cheap Badger brush though, and I might have thrown it away in clogged frustration. Instead, I did the paint job with many, many layers of soft bristle brush blending, using combinations of black, dark brown, yellow ochre and Naples yellow.

About 3/4 of the paint job is finished in this picture.

As you can see, I chose to create the look of a segmented body using paint. I think that this is a better pony/insect hybrid look, and am pretty pleased with the finished result.

The wings are what really makes a flying ant a flying ant, and the wings for this bad boy were no easy feat! I already featured my process in this blog post. Here is a picture of the wings:

Funny observation: I modeled these wings off of actual flying ant wings.
However, in the film, it looks like they used a dragonfly wing pattern. 

In all (the sculpting, painting and wing manking) probably took 20 hours of work. It is now finished, and I will be posting a picture of the finished Antony with his Ant-Man passenger soon! Please let me know if you have any comments or questions!

Custom My Little Ponies: How-to, progress pictures!

These two ponies I'll share are not actually new. What makes them interesting is that I actually took some pictures of my work as I went! This isn't really a how-to, but it will give you an idea of some of the steps I took in completing these projects.

The first one I'll share is my Purgatori custom from 2008. Here she is again, finished:

Lovely little thing, she is

And here are some progress shots. You'll see that I was mainly focusing on the wings and how I put them together. They are basically a wire mesh glued to thin aluminium wire, which was fed through holes in the shoulders and down into each leg. So the weight of the wings is supported all the way down into the feet.

Here you can really see the sculpting and the nice way that Apoxie Sculpt blends into the vinyl of the pony. Note the wire at the base of the wing.

 You can also see that I haven't added the hair yet- that is always the last thing to do: rehairing. No fangs yet either.

In this last shot you can see how I have filled in the wing membrane and started to add the "finger" bones to each wing. The fingers are sculpted onto both the front and the back. 

And voila! Isn't she lovely? 

Nest up is a restoration and customization of a really sad looking G1 Twilight Sparkle. This was for a contest at the MLP Area. First up, lets take a look at this sad girl. Reports are that the family dog used her for a chew toy. 

Ouch! That doesn't look too good. Twilight Sparkle was a So-Soft flocked pony, so the first step was to remove the flocking, which was easily wiped away with acetone. This removed the paint as well. 

Her head didn't look too good, either. I cut all of her hair off then used pliers to pull the plugs out from the inside. 

First thing this girl needed was some ears, I used Apoxie Sculpt to form a new ear tip for her left ear and to fill in the hole and build an ear on the left. The damage was close to her eye, so the brow had to be rebuilt as well. She also had a little nick on her upper lip. 

In the background you can see a bottle of mint hand lotion. Hand lotion (any scent) is great for keeping Apoxie from sticking to your skin. 

After her head was repaired, I rebuilt her missing leg and her dinged back foot. The blue tape and spool are to help her keep her rearing pose while the Apoxie cured. 

That's it for the progress pictures, unfortunately. Since I wanted to keep the rearing pose I decided to give her a long flowing skirt. She was completely sculpted with Apoxie Sculpt and re-haired with Nylon hair. 

As you can see, the repairs blended seamlessly with the original body. Overall, I was very pleased with this piece.