hey everyone Craig Warrack here back with another showcase of my custom action figures and today i'm
diving back into the world of Nintendo villainy with not one but two intergalactic menaces from
the Metroid series it's Ridley and Mother Brain i made these characters as a pair to be displayed
together but i'm going to look at each of them in turn and tell you about their background,
features and how i made them first up let's take a look at Ridley the evil leader of the space
pirates the cunning and deadly creature ridley is a constant enemy of samus aaron appearing in
nearly every game in the metroid series as a major boss my first exposure to ridley was in the 1993
super nintendo classic super metroid where he dramatically appears in the opening of the game
stealing the baby metroid to use in his scheme for galactic domination ridley's look has evolved
over the years from his original appearance as an 8-bit sprite to his modern look of a giant alien
dragon pterodactyl thing with long spindly limbs shrieking fanged mouth huge wings grasping claws
and a whipping tail and here's my figure of him while he may not look it compared to mother brain
ridley was a simpler figure for me to make even though there were some real challenges
for ridley i took an existing figure in this case the mecca's rhino alien took it apart sanded down
all the joints to prevent paint rub cut parts out added parts on such as the tail from a naked
snake alien along with fingers and toes using the fangs from that same figure additional arms
for the wings from the neca newborn alien and another neca alien figure's arm for the neck
listening it back like that it does remind me that that was a lot of work i can forget that
kind of thing when i get to the end of a project but anyway you'll notice there's a lot of use
of neck as alien figures there the alien figures were ideal for this project because they have long
spindly limbs and fairly sturdy joints to support them i know neca have a reputation
for brittle joints in some figures but i didn't really have that issue with any that i used here
it's also appropriate as ridley's character design seems heavily inspired by the design
of the alien xenomorph and even his name as a nod to the director of alien ridley scott
the big challenges with ridley were the wings and the head
the wings were actually the first thing i worked on for this custom if i couldn't get these to work
i wouldn't be able to do the custom at all really i didn't want hard plastic wings and i wanted the
fingers to be possible and the membrane between them to be flexible so i focused on using three
flexible and lightweight materials for the flexible fingers i used floristry wire
for the membrane i used a pair of tights cut pieces and stretched between the frame
held in place with super glue and fabric glue i did consider using latex but i used latex in
my custom of a nylus from over 10 years ago and unfortunately latex rots away over time
to sculpt over the wire of the fingers i used cause clay i'd never used this material before
but while googling around for flexible clay options and seeing what other creatives were
doing on social media i decided to give it a try when baked as directed on the package cos
clay remains flexible so that's a really useful material now ridley's head well you might not
think this would be too much of a challenge as i could just sculpt it from epoxy but really
it's about the weight creating this long thin head from epoxy clay can be difficult because epoxy can
get quite brittle when it's thin and to keep it light i really wanted it to be hollow so long thin
hollow those are things that epoxy clay doesn't really work well with so i turned to 3d printing
last year i bought myself an elgoo mars 3d printer and i'd used it a little to make simple shapes for
my star wars and scooby-doo customs but here i wanted to digitally sculpt and print something
i used my ipad apple pencil and forger and nomad apps for ios and i did my best to learn digital
sculpting i just poked around failed learned failed again and learned until i got to the point
where i thought i understood enough to sculpt digitally it was a steep learning curve but i
was able to translate the sketch i had for ridley into a 3d digital model suitable for printing
so yeah i printed out the head attached it put some wire covered and procreate putty
in the mouth to make a flexible tongue and that was that i'm making that seem a lot easier than
it was but if you want to know more there's literally hours of me making and explaining this
figures creation here on my youtube channel and my customizing live videos so for ridley all that
really remained was for me to paint him i used an airbrush and meg one shot primer to prime him
then applied color with a mixture of airbrush and standard brush i used citadel paints and i also
shaded the wing material with some fabric dye to give it some tone as well i finished him up with
some vallejo matte varnish over most of him with some gloss varnish to pick out some details such
as his eyes claws and the bones emerging from his head ridley stands 12 inches tall from his
toes to the top of his head when he's looking forward even though i didn't really design him
to stand straight up like this he fits well with my ganon and bowser figures and adding his wings
into the equation or stretching his neck upwards he could be considered taller than both of those
articulation wise he moves at the base of his head on a ball joint there's articulation at the
jaw and a flexible tongue he has a swivel and a hinge at the midpoint of his neck
and a swivel hinge and swivel again at the base of his neck his arms rotate at the
shoulders and move this far out to the side there's rotation at the bottom of the bicep
double jointed elbows rotation and the hinge at the wrist the fingers are articulated with hinges
and his thumb has a hinge and a swivel he has a diaphragm ball joint rotation and hinges
at the hips rotation at the top of the thigh a swivel above the knee double jointed knees
swivel at the calf swivel hinges at the ankle and swivel hinges at each of his toes
there's also a swivel at the base of the tail and his tail is flexible along its length
his wings are also articulated with swivel hinges at the i'm going to call these shoulders swivels
and double hinges at the elbows rotation and swivels at the wrists and each of his fingers is
flexible along its length thanks to the floristry wire and cause clay used to construct them
finally for ridley i gave him a little accessory for him to steal
the baby metroid in its containment canister again i 3d printed this as a challenge to
myself and to try using transparent resins with admittedly mixed results that i'm happy
enough with for this little accessory and that's ridley i'm really happy with how he turned out
but ridley was never my favorite villain from the metroid series i made him more as an accessory for
the villain i really wanted to make and that's mother brain mother brain is the literal master
mind behind the evil schemes of the space pirates a biomechanical supercomputer resembling a brain
inside a protective glass case overseeing the metroid experiments mother brain was the final
boss in the original metroid game and the seminal and genre defining super metroid
and kids of the 80s and 90s may also remember a comical version of the villain being the main
antagonist in the captain n tv show mother brain is actually my favorite nintendo villain metroid
was such a difficult game that the final boss mother brain seemed almost mythical to
me unlike bowser and gannon i never made it to mother brain let alone defeat her in the 8-bit
games and i still haven't done it to this day but when i battled her in the 16-bit era super
metroid and she revealed that gross single eye and drooling mouth she really captured my imagination
just as an aside i've always found myself doodling pictures of mother brain over the years here's one
from 2004 that i sent as a silly gift to the man that would become my husband here's another from
more recent years that was one of the first things i drew when i was practicing digital
drawing on my tablet and it was all to tide me over until i had the ability to make this custom
so here's my mother brain mother brain is almost entirely digitally sculpted and printed i've
wanted to make a mother brain custom for many many years but i've never tackled it because with
traditional sculpting with clay i felt limited to making organic shapes like the brain itself but
was always stumped with how to make the geometric tech and machine parts that make mother brain more
than just a disembodied brain but now that 3d printing is a more affordable tool i was able to
tackle this project i digitally sculpted the brain itself using my ipad apple pencil and the nomad
app but for all the other parts that required more geometric design i used the shaper 3d app
this let me design things to exact sizes so that they would fit together
one of the problems with printing something this size is that most of the parts are too large to
be printed by my lg mars printer so i had to split the design up into parts so that i could glue them
together once printed there are a few components that i did not digitally sculpt and print however
the main one being the transparent tank i ordered an acrylic display case online
and had to design and size all of the parts around the size of the cylinder once it arrived
the tubes emerging from the brain were also just cable tidies i bought online i also made the eye
using traditional sculpting materials and the iris from a doll's eye painted red of course i
had thought about filling the tank with fluid but didn't want to deal with the extra weight
making the container watertight and all the other complexities that arise from dealing with
all of that so instead i digitally sculpted and printed columns of bubbles to give the
impression of liquid and to fill some of that empty space that's in the tank
the bubbles also ended up helping channel light from the led lights i installed in mother brain's
tank there are battery compartments connected to strips of leds around the inside of the base
and the lid that are controlled with a remote control that let me change the light color and
pattern but i like the pulsing pattern best i think it suits the idea of the pulsing brain
i just bought these led light strips off of amazon really cheap i finished the custom up with citadel
paints brushed onto the brain and metallic paints airbrushed onto the mechanical parts
i used lots of gloss varnish on the organic parts to make sure that it looked slimy and gross
and so that it reflected the lights mother brain is about 10 inches tall and has a
diameter of about 9 inches and weighs about 2 kilograms i really wanted to keep it light
and 3d printing all of the parts hollow really helped me do that and that's my custom of these
iconic villains from the metroid franchise and i hope you guys like them
viewers may be wondering what i'm going to make next and to be honest i'm not really sure i'm
not really interested in making more nintendo villains so no donkey kong, deeded, king k rool
but maybe some other video game characters would be an interesting project off the top of my head
maybe some of the characters from wonder boy 3 or monster boy something from one of the soulsborne
games, killer instinct characters or maybe i'll move away from video games and do a creature from
mythology like medusa or maybe go back to marvel and try to tackle some characters that have been
on my to-do list for years like stardust, marrow or madame webb i have no shortage of ideas that's
for sure but don't you guys wait for me or anyone else to make a figure you'd like to see from video
games anime movies or wherever why not give customizing action figures a try for yourself
or if that seems out of your ability draw a picture write a story write a poem just get
creative and see where it takes you if you want to know more about how i made these customs i
have hours of footage of that here on my channel and my customizing live videos or
you can go check out some of my previous customs in this playlist anyway thank you for watching
please do hit that like button and subscribe and until next time pour on the power buh bye