Based on the Spawn Movie action figure Jessica Priest
As usual, the first step was to remove all the pieces which didn't exist on the toy I planned to make. I removed some of the tubing and garbage from the figure, cut off the wrist blades, and removed the fetishy high heels. The head needed extra attention, since A) Jessica apparently has advanced scoliosis, and B) her forehead is huge. So I cut off her head, carved it down, filed the neck into a better posture and reattached the head during the Sculpey Phase. Got it a little crooked, though, so Nightbird has her head cocked a little to one side.
Next, I built the mask and part of the cowl onto the carved-down head, in two steps, trying to avoid putting too much Sculpey on at once. I also laid down a base layer on the torso and wristbands, about a millimeter or so thick without worrying about details. Once these had been hardened, I attached the head to the body and built the rest of the cowl, plus the rest of the torso details. At this point I didn't have Steph's pictures, so I didn't make the backpack large enough to match the cartoon. Not that there would have been much room for a bigger backpack, since Jessica is kinda narrow-shouldered. I added some details to the surface with a toothpick. Once I'd hardened the detail layer, I used an X-Acto knife to try and smooth things out. Got pretty close in some areas, but unfortunately (as I found out later) there were too many irregularities to totally remove.
Now it was time for gluing things on with the hot glue gun. I took a pair of Lego daggers (from the Aquasharks line) and glued them to Nightbird's forearms. A couple of short plastic rods became Nightbird's nunchaku, attached to her back. I smoothed out the chainmail-ish waist with a thin layer of glue. The big glue project, however, was the base. Even with the heels, the figure didn't stand too well, and without them it was a lost cause. So I took some Lego pieces and built a stand, which I then glued the figure to. Then I covered the thing with loads of glue to make it look more like a bit of hillside.
The rest was painting. I used mainly colors from the Pactra Airplane Model paint set, plus a darker grey I'd mixed up for a Gundam model a while back, and Ral Partha's yellow, violet, gold and silver paints. The sword was left over from another project, I sharpened it and painted it, adding little Decepticon symbols to the pommel. The very light grey paint required about four coats to get good coverage. Once the painting was done, I added line details with a .25mm technical pen (and added more paint to cover my mistakes). Nightbird ended up with what appeared to be an arched eyebrow (albeit without eyebrows), which went well with the cocked head, so I didn't fix the right eye.
Nightbird retains shoulder and elbow joint motion (the elbows are swivels rather than hinges), but her legs and head are immobile, for reasons which should be obvious at this point.
Major differences in this version include the backpack (made from Legos), the wrist sais (made from putty since I dislike how the Lego knives stick out), the epaulets, leaving the right hip junk on, nunchaku instead of a sword and separate bases for each foot. I made the nunchaku from two short segments of plastic rod with hollow centers, connected by a bit of chain from a cheap necklace I got for a different project, with bits of copper wire connecting the chain to the rods.
While I fixed a lot of mistakes this time out, I introduced a few. I forgot to make the top of the head more pointed and hood-like. And I forgot to put the Decepticon symbol on before scanning, although I'll fix that later.