This Weekend's Project: Golgo 13 Headsculpt

This weekend, I attempted to make a Golgo 13 headsculpt for a Golgo 13 figure. There's already two professionally done ones on the market; one made by Syndicate and one made by Hot Toys. Both cost $200 or more to obtain. So, rather than spend $250-$300 to get one, I'm going to see if it's even possible to make one for under $130! ($13 didn't work, as I already exceeded that price on the body I chose.)

For the body, I defaulted to a Dragon Neo3 Body, since that's all the local store had. I wanted it now and not two weeks from now. That ran me $66. It also gave me a MG Lafette mount and an FG42 rifle.

I had a remaining unused pack of Sculpey III which I recall cost me $3. About 75% of that would be used to make a new head sculpt. Rather than give you the illusion that you can do this easily with progress photos, I'll just summarize the sculpting process. It would have slowed me down more than I'd like by taking progress photos every 20 minutes. The entire process already took me 3 hours.

I started off with a basic featureless head with the nose, face and eyes located. This is perhaps my 11th Sculpey based head, and certainly not my 13th overall, unfortunately, however fitting that would have been. From there, I used only an X-acto knife and a pair of tweezers to finish the sculpt. A proper sculptor would use actual tools, but when you're someone who builds shotguns out of cards, those look like decent tools. Worked for the first 10!

The progress went like this:

1. Etch the hairline and ear positions for reference
2. Flesh out the jawline, pad the eyebrows and hair (he has thick sideburns)
3. Carve reference points for the mouth and eyes
4. Rhinoplasty fever. I don't know why I did the nose first.
5. Shaping the face depressions and mouth
6. Fiddling with the mouth for an absurd amount of time
7. Eyes. 
8. Back to the nose and nostrils. Then more mouth work.
9. Redo eyes because they looked weird.
10. Ears and eyebrows.
11. Dropped head on floor and have to redo the nose.
12. Neck and rear hairline work
13. Thicken regions of the head to be rounder where needed
14. Wonder how terrible the head looks when painted
15. Picking Golgo's nose with a knife, and fiddling with his mouth more
16. Wonder more how bad this may turn out since it's starting to look like Steven Seagal and Spock mixed together

So, three hours passed and I baked the head for another hour, stopping midway while it was soft to smooth out the head where there was excess material. I safely could carve away without fear of crushing a delicate feature.

Some horrible painting skill later, I finished my very own Duke Togo. I feel his head looks a bit big, since he always has the appearance of a smaller head due to his wide build. Since I have the head finished and 9 bodies to swap him around....

Here's TEAM GOLGO 13! The least chatty group of mercenaries ever.

 

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 Now if I could get a model pack to swap out all the character faces with Duke Togo's for TF2, I might be bothered to play again.