Custom Mirage Mikey
Some weeks ago, I painted a black and white Raphael loosely inspired by the early Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. It was a cool project but I wanted to do better…
Back in the day, before the movies, even before the cartoon and the toys, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s creation was a dark and rough looking black and white self-published comic book.
With this new project, I tried to stick to the look of those comics. This time I added gray to my palette and I chose a figure closer to the weird look of those first turtles. I went with a Jump Attack Jujitsu Raph from the Ninja Action line (1993). The Ninja Action line box even stated « ORIGINAL COMIC BOOK TURTLE STYLING ».
And if you look closely, you’ll see that they gave those turtles a tail! A very nice little touch to please all the Mirage hardcore fans. The tail was dropped off in most, if not all, other iterations…mainly because of the phallic look if I recall.
This Raph looks pretty good and is very easy to find, but I still had one little problem…I didn’t have any sai left for him…I only had a bootleg nunchaku. So I had to depersonalize the belt. I knew I wanted to fill the screw holes in the shell by using epoxy clay so here was my easy solution. I took a small bit of epoxy clay to cover the belt buckle and with the tip of a paper clip, I modeled it to look like a knot. Now this turtle could be Mikey and it was closer to the original look too.
The shell had 3 huge screw holes. At first I thought of getting another shell and get rid of the backpack but the backpack is cool and I wanted to keep the flipping action working, so I simply filled the holes with epoxy clay.
With what I had left of epoxy clay (I hate when I have to throw any away) I thought I’d make him a pizza slice. Now, with the nuchuks in one hand and the slice in the other, I really feel like the strange stance is justified.
That was a very fun custom to do and I already have many ideas for other projects around that theme. Thanks a lot for your interest! Questions and constructive criticism are always welcome!
