Pearsonic Productions: Chance - Fwoosh Secret Santa

I give you: Chance ! (?)

Who?

Where to start? Now, I'm no long_road, but I like to tell a story once and a while, and there's a bit of one for this creation.

Now, this was my 1st time being a part of CSS. When I received my list of characters for who I was to 'elf' for, I was told he was a HUGE Spiderman fan. The list was pretty open-ended, the only characters that were specifically mentioned were one the person did NOT want - Puma, Chamelon, and one or 2 others.

I was thankful for the open ended list. Since I was, (and in my eyes still am,) reletively green to customizing, a lot of characters to choose from to create was cool. I wanted to choose someone important to Spiderman history that chances are, would never get the ML treatment. One of my 1st thoughts was: Calypso - since I was a huge fan of McF's work on the Torment arc, but I wanted to stick to what I beleived to be my known strengths and not do too much experimenting with this creation. I had a feeling if I choose to do her, she would not of turned out all that great.

Sure, there are many, MANY Spiderman villans to choose from, some very welll known, to those practically forgotten or unknown. As cool as it would of been to do a main-vien villan in my own artistic interpretation, I felt something true to Spidey lore was warranted. I had eyed doing 1, possibly 2 Spider slayers, (similar to what had recently happened for TMNT - the Mousers,) but they would of been small in stature, and most likely comically inaccurate.

As I continued to peruse Spidey history, I noticed that Amazing Spider-man issues #298 & 299 had been done by McF, and were the 2 issues before the 1st appearance of Venom. In fact here is a little factiod I gleamed just now from the interweb:

A new recompilation of the Venom saga is going to be released April, 04, 2007 to go along with the movie. It's called Spider-Man birth of Venom and right now Amazon's price is only $19.79. It Collects Secret Wars #8; Amazing Spider-Man #252-259, #298-300 & #315-317; Fantastic Four #274 and Web of Spider-Man #1

From what I had read, ASM #300 was the 1st, full appearance of Venom.

Now, I think the thing that sealed the deal on my choice was the fact that my introduction to Marvel and it's universe wasn't through reading comics, or enjoying the cartoons, but it was the summer of '93 when I was volunterring for a summer day camp for a Boys & Girls Club that I frequented, (I practically lived there,) when I was growing up. Another volunteer who I met for the 1st time that summer got me and a few of my pals HOOKED on TSR's Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game. I've amassed a pretty decent collection of the games material over the years, and one of those first books I had was a character update that amongst all the colourful characters, (Bird Boy, Bushwacher, Nanny & Orphan Maker, Forbush Man! to name a few,) Chance was also in the book. (I still to this day do not know all of the characters from this roster update book, since I was given it by a friend who had it in his hands before he knoew me from the library, and it was missing a bunch of pages!)

As I read up on Chance, I thought he would be a good choice since he was both a villain and an ally to Spiderman.

Now, onto the behind-the-scenes sh!t:

I looked at what I had for fodder, (which is a good deal since I've been stock-piling it before I started to customize, so I would have a decent breadth of it when I decided to get my hands hacked up in the pursuit of the art,) and when it all shook down, HML1 Banshee was ideal for the treatment. As you will see in later photos, his colour scheme was basically an inverted Chance.

Filled up all his holes, (was my 1st time filling joint holes,) and almost immediately knew I'd have to do something about Banshees horrendous neck:

(Thought I had WIP pis of the neck fix, and the difference it made - can't find them just now. I'm sure we all know - Banshee has a giraffe neck!)

So, did some cutting & some dremelling, sank the neck down, sculpted and blended it all together.

Cyclops from TB Series 10 donated the melon.

Now it may not look it, but getting that head right was a real b!tch. The reference pics I utilized had the goggles/visoer looking really bulbous. It took me a few times over to get the shape just right. I initially planned on incorporating the Cerebro from Prof. X to give Chance a more helmeted look, but it came out looking too odd.

I instead hacked up Cerebro an used a portion of it for the middle raised part of the helmet. I did my best to make the rest of the helmet uniform in shape.

Sculpted on the mini 'stache, also sculpted the collar and the wrist and ankle bracelets.

All was prgressing well - quite well.

I had the tubes for the power pack mapped out from a McF fig - one of the nitro riders I believe. I had a feeling the back-pack from XMC Gambit was going to be an easy use for the power pack - I was wrong.

I hacked that thing to pieces when I realised a small portion of it was still useful, and began to cut up saved backings from the old TB ML's clamshells, ( I had quite a few of them up until I had to move. That stock pile of custom fodder is now gone, ) and began to glue together a power pack of pproper size and porportion. From my main ref pic, it seemed to sit just above his shoulders, but no lower than his mid back.

After much glueing and even more Kneadatite applied to try and have it form a square pack, I settled for what I could accomplish, (I was becoming frustrated with trying to perfect it.) I wanted to add some detail to the pack, similar to what is barely seen in the ref pic, and managed to give it some. (Looked, can't find any WIP pics of the pack - will have to critique it based on finished photos.)

I created the belt out of Mr. Sinister cape, and lost 1 part of it right near finish. (My only thing I'm mad at myself for: not having a chance to paint the bits of red on the belt raisings.)

I was orignally clueless as to what to do for his wrist blasters. As I sifted through fodder, and bits of fodder, (I rarely throw anything tidbits away,) I came across the fittings for Banshee's cape. a drilling here, and a snip there - whallah: Wrist Blasters! The barrel for each of them was sculpted with Kneadatite by moi.

Onto the 7th inning stretch.........

Painting.

I wanted to capture the off-lime grren colour of the lighter green, and mixed up some Tamiya Park Green and Yellow. I kept a measure of this mix aside for touch ups, and boy am I glad I did, (I needed to draw fro that well a few times over the course of finishing.)

The darker green was Tamiya Flat Green.

I originally used a black pen for the costume separating details, but found it run once clear-coated for sealing. Went back at it with a Tamiya Flat black and my finest brush, (wasn't easy!)

I really wanted the gold to pop, as well as the sheen of the goggles/visor. A lot of people has been using Alu-Cad (sp ?) for customs like Cpt. Atom and Silver Silver. You think I could find some in Canada? Was told by my hobby shop - no longer allowed for import to Canada - doesn't meet safety standards. Was reccomended a paint-pen that appeared to bewhat I wanted. It turned out decent enough, but if I had to do it again, I think the later foil suggetion I was given may be more chromatic for my purposes of effect.

So, down went the metallic silver to the goggles/visor, and well as the eventual gold parts, (collar, helmet, tubes, powerpack, wrist & ankle bracelets & blasters.)

Gold stuff was golded up with Tamiya Clear Yellow.

Repainted the face area with 2 different flesh tones.

And, as I rounded 3rd base headed for home on this production, I also fell flat on my face iches short of home plate: As i was permanently affixing the powerpack to Chances back, and the glue began to set, it almost glued his ab crunch permanently in place. I was lucky enough to avert disaster and all was well.

The tubes to helmet was achieved by driling holes in head, and the tubes had nifty little tube extensions to plug in there and glue. The other ends: I set screws into the top of the pack, and had to drill out a measure of tube. I almost botched this too, but again, luckily averted disaster.

When all was said and done, here's how he looked: