Custom Figurines - Female Basketball Player - Part 1

This will end up being a rather long post if all together so I am breaking it into a couple of posts Check out Part 2 here: https://steemit.com/hobby/@bigskycustoms/custom-figurines-female-basketball-player-part-2 and Part 3 here: https://steemit.com/hobby/@bigskycustoms/custom-figurines-female-basketball-players-part-3-finish. I am going to go into a bit more detail than I usually do and include some of the steps in the process. This was an order for 2 custom figurines of the same lady, first in her high school uniform and the second in her college uniform. Veronica Shaw played high school basketball at Mountain Pointe High School in the Phoenix area.

After a stellar high school career, she went on to play at San Diego State University.

Starting out
When I start a project I work with the customer and find a pose (or two in this case) that is workable for the project. Since there are no female basketball action figures that work for what I do, I have to convert McFarlane male players into females. This requires finding heads that work also.

The Michonne figure from the Walking Dead (7") figures was released about a year or so ago and the head size is pretty close to being right for matching the Mcfarlane poses. This is one of the few female African American heads that appeared to be work about for this project. She selected two poses, and we ended up having to switch one later during the process.

She chose an Allen Iverson pose for the Mt Pointe figure.

We settled on Jason Terry for the SDSU pose.

Modifications
To achieve the look of a female, I like to reduce the musculature of the male figures, I also like to use the neck connection of the male head if I can, so I did a face swap on the two heads with the MIchonne face>

In the picture above, I have removed the Iverson face and glued on the Michonne face. The head band was going to stay on the figure which also helped with the face swap.

A lot of the time the hands on the males are too large, so on the Iverson pose I did a hand swap (the hands on the Terry Pose were ok with some minor sanding). This entails cutting the hand off and pinning a new hand to the arm.

You can see I have reduced the size of the arm muscles using a dremel sanding drum tool. I also had to remove a sleeve that was on the original figure. I will later build the arms back up using sculpting putty.

I also didn't like the shoes on the Iverson figure as they didn't have laces and I needed laces, plus they were bigger than what I wanted so I did a swap with another set of shoes, again, cutting and pinning.

Another adjustment I will do is shorten the arms and legs if needed. the Iverson legs and arms were ok, but I did shorten the Terry arms (but not the legs). Again cutting a thin section out of the bicep and the forearm and pinning with sanding and putty work to hide the match point.

Sculpting Features
She wanted a knee brace and patella band on the SDSU figure, plus arm bands. The Terry base figure had one arm band so I added the second, sculpted the knee brace and patella band using Apoxie Sculpt putty. I sanded off the high socks and made shorter ones also.

And she wanted the uniform taped together at the top of the jersey, which requiured some dremel work and putty work to form the tape.

Lastly I had to sculpt her hair to match a tight weave on the top with a pony tail (see Part 2 for the pony tail discussion).

This completed Part 1 of 2 for this subject. Please check out Part 2 which will follow shortly.

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