The base for this toy was the Spawn line figure "She-Spawn," a rather spike-covered and masked figure I had some time ago given up on being able to kitbash into anything else. But that was before I discovered Sculpey modeling compound, which lets me make significant changes to plastic toys. Between Sculpey, my glue gun and some plastic scoops I had gotten while working on my Cowl Cyberjet project I had enough extra material to turn She-Spawn into something. Specifically, into Minerva.

    I started by removing everything I didn't need, peeling the skull-bra and bony shoulderpads off the figure, cutting the ponytail off, and taking an X-Acto knife to the spikes and chains and leather straps where possible. I decided that the left legband was too big to remove smoothly, so I figured I could incorporate it into something else (eventually settled on a holster).

    The next step was the Sculpey, since I'd have to heat the whole figure up to cure the modeling compound...doing the hot glue before the Sculpey would be a bad idea. First I tested the figure to make sure the heat wouldn't permanently deform it, and was happy to find the toy just got more rubbery, rather than sagging. I cut two pieces from the remains of a plastic scoop and glued them to the chest and abdomen to provide the chestplate planes, then filled in the area around them with Sculpey. I added the pelvic details, forearms, shoulderpads, helmet (minus antennae), boots, wheels and legband covering in various stages, curing the compound with a hairdryer. I chose to reduce the size of the shoulderpads dramatically for the simple reason that anything much larger than what I did wouldn't cure well and would be too brittle to work with. I also omitted the "scoop" behind the figure's head for similar reasons, and also to make the head easier to work on. I used an X-Acto knife to carve down some of the lumpier areas (especially on the right boot, which is almost totally Sculpey...the right boot I only had to add a little to, since it's a trademarked McFarlane Oversized Asymmetrical Pair of Boots) and make sure the limbs could move freely. The helmet required a LOT of carving.

    Once I was satisfied that I wasn't going to add more Sculpey (although I did carve away a few bits here and there as things progressed), it was time for the gluegun. I fused the elbows and knees so I could paint over them (the hips are designed so that the joint is a circle, no unpainted areas would be revealed with leg movement), glued Cosmic Angela's holster (a leftover from the Circuit Breaker project) to the legband and glued a pair of plastic pieces to the helmet as antennae. I got the plastic pieces from the framework that held my Ronin Warriors' weapons...I've been holding onto those pieces of scrap plastic for a couple years now, since they come in handy for kitbashing every so often. I also added some detail to the antennae with the gluegun.

    Then I painted it all, mainly with gloss acrylic enamel white and red (Pactra paints), requiring a whole LOTTA coats to cover even the Sculpey'ed areas fully. I had to mix the yellow-orange for the face, and I think it came out a little too orangey, but that mainly shows up in the scans. And no, I didn't do any funky effects to make the eyes look like they're glowing in the scan, I got that with paint...medium blue with light blue almost but not quite covering it. So the eyes are light blue with a very thin rim of medium blue, giving a glowing effect (especially since orange and blue are complementary colors). Final details, such as lines on the face and boots I added with a .25mm technical pen.