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I took a break from painting my miniatures for a couple weeks to try my hand at making custom NFL players from the McFarlane toys line. I discovered, while browsing the internet for ideas, that there is actually a small community devoted to making custom figures so it became a nice little adventure from typical wargame miniatures. The backstory behind this idea was that we had a large group of family members for a Secret Santa pool (that's where you secretly get only one other person in the group to buy a present for, to save on money for everyone). I drew my girlfriend's sister, who happens to be a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Since the rest of her family lives in either Southeast Michigan (Lions fans), or the Michigan upper peninsula (Green Bay fans), I really wanted to make something unique to represent the different family allegiances. I didn't plan on spending a lot of money, so I just picked up whichever the cheapest figures were on eBay and quickly threw a pose together:



I got to work in small spurts until the diorama was finished. The nice part about the project was that it didn't require any attention to detail, and was a nice change from constantly fixing mistakes and flaws on smaller, wargame miniatures. I was able to gather that her favorite Steelers player was Hines Ward, and I remember hearing her say Fudge Packers about 30-40 times during the Packers-Steelers Super Bowl a couple years back, so Chuck Fudge takes the field for Green Bay. Since the Lions have been the pathetic punchline team for years, and have the 0-16 record, I thought Percy Kitten was a good player to represent that team.



I hadn't used decals in years, so it was a bit frustrating at first to use them again. Fortunately, I had printed triples of every decal I needed predicting the difficulty. The end result was quite good quality compared to other custom figures that sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, so I am actually tempted in doing this again in the future! For those of us that have spent years painting miniatures, it's a piece of cake to work on models of this size and it appears that the earning potential may actually make it a good source of additional income, so I wanted to share that with anyone else who may be interested.

It looks really good.

I did someting similar for the birthday of a "friend", but have no photo. She is nuts about Winnie the Ooh, so I bought a "paint-it-yourself" Eeyore, but instead of using the very crappy paints that came with it, painted it up using Citadel paints, with proper shading, blending, etc, very well done eyes, all that stuff. She loved it and still keeps it on her desk at work.

Might be a way of making money, such dioramas... I wonder if there is a market in the UK for Man Utd/Liverpool dioramas...

That's actually a brilliant idea. As a United fan myself, I am tempted to make one with Howard Webb pulling out the yellow card for a diving Luis Suarez. That would be great office desk material.

That looks great, I've always thought that the best presents are the ones with a personal touch. Top job!

With me being a Blackburn Fan, I'm wondering if I should make a diorama with a flag draped chicken in front of a bemused Paul Robinson......

That looks great. If you can end up making some money from these all the better.

Though Hines Ward is looking awfully pale in your diorama...

I didn't worry about repainting the flesh, but I was told that Ward didn't have the darkest of skin color.



A good idea would probably be to at least wash the skin tones that are already present on the figure. Of course, I don't have this in my possession anymore, but it's a good thought for next time.

I'm loving my boy Ward there. I wish he was still playing!

How dare you defile Ed Mcaffrey and my Denver Broncos!