Customized Sports Figurines - Two Football playing Brothers from a Montana High School

It has been a while since I have posted an article about my sports figurine customizing hobby so I finished a pair for two brothers from Helena Capital High School in Montana for their high school graduation. Actually they are half brothers and the mother of one ordered the figurines for them when they graduated this past weekend.

As always I work with the customer to pick the poses they like. The two boys played line, one was a center and the other a defensive end. I showed the mom a number of poses and luckily for me she chose two that required minimal work to achieve the final pose. The two poses are shown below, a Kevin Mawea for the center and a Ray Lewis celebration pose for the DE.

I had to redo the left arm of the center pose as she wanted his arm out from the body and with a bare fist, replace the gloved right hand, add the leggings and a different helmet. I had to replace Ray Lewis' bare hands with gloved hands and same with the helmet, needed to replace it and the head, add leg pads and tape the ankles.
Here are the two figures in parts after being taken apart.

Here is the new left arm and replacement hands for the center pose. I also had to sand off the elbow sleeve on the right arm and a play sleeve on the new left arm which came from a QB Pose.

A picture of all the parts on the center pose, the hands have been added. The brass rod is for attaching the left arm to the body. I had to do a little putty work to make the fit work, plus a lot of fittings as I had to be careful the arm didn't run into the leg once the body was put back together. In the picture below I had not sanded off the tall socks or make the leggings. I made the leggings with teflon plumbers tape. The wrists were later taped also using 1/8" pinstriping tape.

For the Lewis pose I had to sand off socks and add the ankle tape. Note the gray primer I use after doing sanding and other alterations. It allows you to spot imperfections so they can be fixed prior to final priming and painting.

In the pictures below, I have added the leg pads using sculpting putty. Notice the use of an engineers scale to help create the leg stripe decals. I also added some length to the right leg pant as it seemed too short to me with relation to the left leg. This required that I add the right leg and glue it in place, as I had to sculpt over part of it. You can barely see the leg in the second photo.

Skipping a number of steps ahead, the helmets both had a lot of little "pride" stickers, a skull and cross bones and a bears head (team mascot are the Bruins). Here is one of the actual helmets.

The little stickers are made with clear decal paper so once printed I cut them out, sometimes in patterns and sometimes as singles, and apply them. The singles are very tiny so it becomes very time consuming to apply a lot of them.

And skipping a few more steps, here are the final pieces:

And here are the boys after they received their figurines at their graduation party. This is the best part, looking at the people who get these.

Thanks for checking out my blog on my custom sport figurine hobby. Please feel free to comment, I love to read comments from people.
@bigskycustoms