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!