Evenfall TOTEM Thug Suit

A bit of an odd outlier - a friend attended San Diego Comic Con and brought this kit for me as a gift. I was familiar with the work of painter Ashley Wood from his involvement with Metal Gear Solid, but had little experience with his toys and models in 3A (I know they made a really expensive Ma.K toy at one point!). This very Ma.K-inspired design came on a single sprue of only about a dozen or so parts, so I decided this would be my first major foray into kitbashing.

One of the oldest WIP images I have! Fall of 2013 if the JPEG metadata is to be believed!

I gathered some random bits, and at the time, I had not learned the valuable lesson of "always start with a plan" and immediately started gluing spare parts together and seeing what stuck (literally).

The 1/100 Zaku arms were added due to the kit arms being those hollow one-piece arms you sometimes see on SDs. Other than those Zaku arms and the Rick Dias monoeye, I can't remember what most of the other parts are from.

This was also an early experiment with doing cast texture on armor - if memory serves me correctly, it was Tamiya White Putty thinned down with lacquer thinner jabbed on with a very old paintbrush with blown out bristles.

Now, looking back at this build, I completely cringe at the sloppy building, painting, and detailing. While I feel like I still have a lot more learning to do, it is encouraging to look back at an early work and feel a sense of improvement. If anything, looking at these images now makes me want to work even harder to learn new techniques!