While I really liked each of the previous Cages I had customized, I felt that there was more I could do. Both of those were made from wrestling figure bases - and while those had improved over time, they were still quite large compared to Marvel Legends. That was ok for the Cable & Deadpool version, where he had been drawn quite large, but wouldn't do for his New Avengers look.
It was really
this Cage custom by Seawing that got me off my butt. I'd been an admirer of the headsculpt on the Marvel Legends Cage ever since seeing
his painted prototype at San Diego Comic Con, and had been wondering if it could be reworked for a modern Cage. After seeing Seawing's rendition, I knew I would have to do one myself.
Seawing used the ML Cage as the base for his. I had one, but wanted to keep it intact for his classic look. Instead, I ordered a headcast of Cage from
Black Arachnis Casting (highly recommended). For his dome, I did the heavy lifting with a dremel and then smoothed it out with a sanding board. For the tighter spots, I used a carving bit on the dremel.
From the neck down to the boots, it's a SOTA Street Fighter Guile. I dremeled away the sculpted wife beater. It would have been much easier to leave it there, but I wanted to have an interchangeable jacket / no-jacket look, and for that, one pair of shoulders would be easier than two. After removing the tank top, I sculpted the t-shirt collar with Apoxie Sculpt.
The t-shirt arms came from the Frankenstein's monster from the ML Monsters box set. I added the t-shirt sleeves with Apoxie. The jacket and jacketed arms are from a TNA wrestler - I don't remember his name, but he had a cowboy hat too. The jacketed arms were originally very long - I shortened them at the shoulder sockets and took out more in the forearms. I also had to modify Guile's shoulder pegs to work with both sets of arms. I removed the original mushroom caps and then carved in a channel on the thick "base" of the original pegs. Even with the pegs shortened significantly, the elbow hinges in the jacketed arms are so big that the socket I drilled into them locks the top half of the articulation in place.
For the cap, I first wrapped Cage's head in saran wrap, then sculpted the cap on top of that. The sunglasses are two Apoxie "lenses" glued to craft wire. The wire just wraps around his head - the cap holds the glasses in place pretty well, but they'd stay on without it.
Paint was fairly simple. I sprayed most of the figure with black vinyl dye and supplemented with black Sharpie where needed. I drybrushed some blue on for the jeans. Fleshtones are Liquitex taupe over a Americana tan flesh base. I forgoed the drybrush to make the veins pop - if you think it needs it, let me know.
