If you ever visit Lima, Ohio, drop by a small shop called Lima Nails. My older sister and her husband are the owners of that store. She likes to collect Barbies and other cool toys, including 1/6 figures. When she came to visit me last year, she saw and fell in love with my original Master Wong figure (among many others). Needless to say, if you stop by her shop, you will see my original Master Wong figure as well as a few others which I gave her. While I do not sell any of my figures, I do give them away to family and friends, or do occasionally trade them off to people who really deserve them for things I need and can't find.
Ever since I gave away the original Fei Hung figure to my sister, I've been dying to make a new version for myself. Jumping from one project to the next so much, I tend to lose track of the figures I want to do until an idea to better a method or technique pops in my head. Well, I've finally remastered Master Wong to a point where I'm totally happy with him. Wong Fei Hung is a figure I'd want to give the proper treatment, and that, he has received.
Master Wong here has been created using most of everything I know to date. All of your skills are put to the test when you update or redo a figure you've done before. You can compare the two versions side by side and you'll definitely see what skills you've progressed over time.
First and most notably is my sculpting. Master Wong's face here is completely reconstructed. I used the same BBI Asian bodybuilder base, sanded his hair, eyebrows, nose, mouth and cheekbones away and resculpted it, using several reference photos of Jet Li. While sculpting his face, I realized that Jet Li has some really big cheekbones. His cheekbones are really emphasized here. His nose is also bigger and rounder than the BBI version. His hair is a combination of rooting and hair gluing. His ponytail braid is rooted hair while the top base is glued on so it looks more pulled back. Rooted hair won't look as good and will flop around when pulled back into a ponytail. Believe me, I tried and destroyed two heads trying to root his entire head.
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Second most noticeable improvement I've made is my sewing skills. I sewed everything you see here - his white undershirt and pants, belt, socks, leg wraps, and even the shoes. The shoes were made using DML's inner boot soles, painted white. I sewed his shoes from black and white pleather and glued it to the base, then painted the designs on with fabric paint. I knew I wanted to do cloth shoes a long time ago, but I never figured out how. I tried sewing the shoes out of various fabric materials and screwed up over four times before I got it to this point. Pleather is strong and takes fabric glue very well. His undershirt is sewn with white cotton while his pants are sewn from a hard canvas-like material. His belt and leg wraps are sewn from a cream colored cotton like the shirt. Now his outer Chinese gown was harder to make. It is sewn from stretch khaki. I really liked the material on my J-Crew cargo pants and knew I wanted to make Master Wong's coat from that same material, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Stretch khaki is extremely sturdy and doesn't wrinkle that much - good for when you need to do all those extra cool poses. After trying to find stretch khaki for a few months, I gave up and destroyed my $65 pair of pants to make his coat. My wife would go ballistic if she found out I did that.
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I initially used the BBI 1.0 body that came with the bodybuilder figure, like my original Master Wong, but I realized a few things. The articulation, while pretty good, is nowhere near as good as BBI's new G3.5 body. It would also be extremely annoying to convert any bendy hands to fit the 1.0 body. I used CYGirl hands on the original Master Wong figure! I finally converted him to a G3.5 body and used Dragon's bendy hands for the extra cool poses. Dragon's hands are interchangeable with the BBI G3.0 and G3.5 bodies without any modification so that definitely saved me some time. Master Wong is a figure that needs all the articulation he can use and the BBI G3.5 body can handle most of the poses really well.
Master Wong is known for his martial arts lion dance so it's only proper that he have a Lion Head! I got two sets of these dragon heads from China Sprout for about $12 each. They are perfect for 1/6 scale figures. I've gotten two other ones before but they were too small. One of these days when my projects die down, I'll probably sew him a hat and make him an umbrella to beat some baddies with. Hope you enjoy the background music! It was my biggest inspiration for doing Master Wong. The theme song for Once Upon a Time in China always gets me hyped up for some reason. Every time it starts playing in the movies, you know Master Wong is about to open up a can of whoop-ass on some baddies!
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