I employed a lot of new things I have never done before with Solid Snake.  First and foremost is the use of Apoxie.  While I've been a die-hard fan of Sculpey, I was pretty reluctant to use Apoxie at first.  I knew I wanted to sculpt some muscles or enhance certain body parts and facial features, but Sculpey was not very good to use in these situations.  Limberwillow, another customizer whom I admire a lot, had recommended the use of Apoxie to me.  I've seen her done some marvelous work with it on her figures and I remember Jimbobwan used quite a bit of it on his awesome body sculpting.  But I was too scared to try it.  There's always a first time for everything and looking back, I'm very glad I found Apoxie because I have not touched another block of Sculpey clay since.

The first challenge was obviously Snake's awesome looking I-want-blood sculpt.  Solid Snake is a rough-and-ready soldier who's been out in the field one too many times and trying to achieve that look with an existing sculpt is quite hard.  The closest sculpt I could think of using before this was the Punisher sculpt put out by Toybiz.  I was pretty close to modifying the Toybiz Punisher headsculpt to use as Snake, but before I was about to modify him, I thought, hey, I could do something like that.  I ended up modifying a DML headsculpt with apoxie.  Anyone wanna guess who the original DML sculpt is of?  I shaved off his hair, eyebrows, nose, and mouth and resculpted everything.

For the hair, I also implemented something I have not done with hair before.  While it is still gluing rabbit fur, I did a slight variation to that theme by cutting out the entire scalp, gluing the rabbit fur onto the scalp, and then reattaching the scalp back on the the head again.  Sounds like fun huh?  The extra muscles are sculpted with Apoxie onto an existing BBI G-3.5 body.  Apart from the super-articulated bodies made by Volks, BBI's G-3.5 has the second best articulation out of any current 12" figure bodies.  I initially sculpted his muscles out very smoothly.  I left a Hot Toys muscle body on the counter and started working the sculpt with the Hot Toys as a base.  But once the Apoxie dried and the outfit came on, it did not look that good.  He only looked cool with his shirt off.  So I went to the drawing board once again and this time around, I over-exaggerated his muscles quite a bit.  The idea worked and his muscles are just popping out of the body suit.  Here are two photos I shot when I first completed his muscles.

The shiny metallic silver spandex suit is a custom piece made by Skip and Robin Are of Project Are.  I love Skip and Robin's stuff and I try to use what I can from them when opportunity presents itself.  Thinking that I got his bodysuit out of the way and that would've been the hardest thing, I was quite happy.  Of course I was wrong because everything else made the suit a simple task.  His vest, hand gun holster, knee and elbow pads had to all be custom made.  Not only that, it had to match in color!  I knew I wanted a darker color scheme than his suit, so the search for the right fabric began . . . of course the search didn't end for about two months.

I finally ended up using stretch gun metallic gray spandex for his gear.  I cut out a DML elbow pad, ripped the plastic off of a BBI cloth knee pad and sewed my own then glued the pads onto the cloths.  His chest harness was a royal pain in the butt to do too.  It consists of four separate pieces, but they were all linked together with webbing material.  Because it was a weapons/chest harness it also had to be padded like real armor.  Not only that, spandex would not retain shape!  It would stretch and skew and if you made a vest out of it, it won't stay.  I was perplexed for a few days on how to conquer the spandex and then I remembered . . . vinyl.  Vinyl is tough, but it is also very rigid and can be sewn also.  I sewed the vinyl directly into the spandex so it became one sheet instead of just padding the vinyl down.  I then took the pocket attachments from BBI's SWAT figure (all four of them) and sewed it directly onto the chest harness. The end results look quite cool.

Once I conquered the chest harness, I popped open myself a can of beer to celebrate but another problem arose. . . his gun holster.  I loved the new BBI Raider's hand gun.  Too bad the holster that came with it was a cheesy side waist holster.  Otherwise, I'd probably use it to save me the trouble of making this one.  I employed the same vinyl spandex method from his vest to make the holster.  Making the holster slightly bigger allowed me to make more carrying space for his gear.  I made an extra compartment on the right to carry his detachable silencer and one on the left to carry his cigarettes and two red flares.  The gun holster is attached to his rappelling harness.

All in all, Solid Snake was a super fun project to do.  I've done things I have never done and never even dreamed of doing before.  He has also now dethroned Dante as my favorite figure.  Sorry Dante, but I still love you all the same.  I also have Olga, Meryl, Sniper Wolf, Revolver Ocelot and possibly Vulcan Raven in the works so check back soon.  Until next time . . . ;)!