I got a 1977 3.75 kenner Ben Kenobi in a job lot whose torso had remained orangy-brown but whose limbs had turned a dark brown. I tried retrobrighting them but it didn't work and as sunshine is pretty rare these days in Sydney anyway, I decided to customise it instead. I tried to go for a look that was closer to the movie depiction while trying not to look too far away from what a 1977 figure would have looked like. I painted the figure off-white with some black accent to match Ben's undershirt. Taking inspiration from the Jawa's cloth robes, I made his robes out of a discarded canvas shopping bag as it had the right rough look. I kind of eyeballed the measurement and think it may be a bit small. I tried dieing the robes using tea and coffee but I couldn't get the right brown colour so I gave up and painted the robes using diluted acrylic paint mixed with some PVA glue which made the robe pretty stiff. The light saber was made using a plastic cocktail fork.

Work In Progress. I wanted for my first DIY toy costume (using a 12 inch GI Joe figure) to be the uniform of a Rural Fire Service volunteer because of what's going on these days here in New South Wales. I then quickly realised I had no idea what the %?$@ I was doing so instead for my first homemade costume I went for a simple track suit using an old pair of socks (reserving the bright red undies for a DIY Mego Robin costume). Part way through doing it though, the horizontal stripe across the chest made me think of the uniform of the Sandmen from Logan's Run so I have now decided to go for that instead.

Chell, the protagnist of the Portal series of games which are some of my all-time favourite. I designed her wearing her costume from Portal 2 as the one she wore in the first portal game, an orange jumpsuit, felt a bit plain. The paper maquette is 35mm from head to toes so about 1/52 to 1/60 scale depending how tall Chell is actually meant to be. The arms and legs came out a bit too bulky when compared to the character in-game. The portal gun for its part feels to be a bit too long. I might make another version at some point.

I like the ease of customisation and cheapness in making paper figurines for games but, for fairly obvious reason, I find that they are hard to see on large displays unless you're at just the right angle. Because of that, I've started a bit of experimentation into making 3D paper figurines. below are a few examples made in the past 2 months, all of which about 40mm tall or about equivalent to the 1:43 / O scale. Their construction, so far, tends to be the same: a carcasse of cardboard over which printed paper is applied.