I was never happy with the original Galactus Minimates Max statue. My main problem was with his face. In the image above, the original statue is on the left, and my modified version is on the right. You can see that the face area on the original is very, very small. I can understand why DST designed him this way – this was supposed to be a large minimate, so the head was in proportion to a standard minimate head wearing a helmet. But this ignores the fact that Galactus has a very long head, and other minimates with long heads have received special treatment, such as The Leader and Sinestro. So I came up with a plan to cut Galactus’s head in half and make him into my ideal version of the character.

This is a project I have wanted to do for a long time, but it kept getting set aside. I finally decided to start on it in September of last year after seeing pictures of the Infinity Gauntlet Box Set. I didn’t want to have this amazing Thanos and Adam Warlock displayed next to Mr. Squishy Face. I wanted a Galactus that blended in with the more recent levels of detail we are seeing on minimates.

My first step was the most crude. I used my dremel with a cutting wheel to remove his antennas (for lack of a better word) and cut beneath his eyes. The wheel was not large enough to make it all the way through his head, so I had to finish off a portion of the middle with a fine toothed coping saw. This was a very messy process, and I wore goggles and a painting mask, because the dremel produced a big cloud of resin dust.

As I was getting ready to start raising his face up, I accidentally snapped off his left arm (the one pointing down). This made me think about the position of his right arm, and I realized I would much prefer it to be pointing down, as opposed to the “hailing a taxi cab” position. So I snapped off that arm as well. The arms are glued onto a shoulder peg. It’s not a joint, because the arms cannot rotate. They can only fit onto this peg a certain way. I had to once again don my goggles and mask and dremel the peg and the inside of the arm to make it fit the way I wanted it to. I set the arms aside for now.

I knew that I would have to sculpt Galactus’s details in different stages because he would be unsteady at first with his head in two pieces. I filled in the gap with Super Sculpey, and baked him in the oven until it was cured. I superglued around the edges of this sculpted area to make it more secure. Galactus stayed in this unfinished state for over three months, as I was busy with the toy store’s holiday season.

I was able to start working on him again after the first of the year. I used Apoxie Sculpt to recreate his face from scratch. I had to leave his antennas off for now, as they would have interfered with my range of movement.

After it had cured, I attached the antennas again, and started filling in the gaps left by the rough cut of the dremel. I also started sculpting the top piece of his helmet, as I had accidentally snapped this off while cutting his head.

I wanted to change his eyes to give him smaller pupils than the original. Galactus has square pupils, but the size of the pupils on the original statue made him look like he had googly eyes. I painted his eyes black first, and then took care of the skin color on his face.

I started mixing paints to match the bright pink color of the original statue. I tried using both Citadel and Model Master paints (not together of course), but I couldn’t get the exact color right. You can see this difference in the image above if you compare the area around his eyes with the area above his visor. The picture doesn’t show how different those two colors looked in person. It looked bad.

After wasting a good amount of paint trying to match the colors, I decided to just repaint the entire statue. I didn’t think that bright pink color was accurate to the version of Galactus I was making anyways. I hadn’t planned on repainting him initially, but if I was going to invest this much time into a custom, I wanted to do it right. I decided to add a little more purple into the mix, lighten the color, and tone down the intense saturation. You can see the color difference in the first image of this post. Every part of him received three coats of paint, which took me another five weeks to find the time to do.

After repainting all of the pink/purple, and then the blue, I started adding the black details. I wanted to do this statue using only a brush, and no sharpie. I can’t remember the number of the brush I was using, but it was really tiny. I sketched his face on using a pencil before painting it. I added much more detail than the original statue had, to make him look more like a modern minimate.

I painted the eyes last, which is what I usually do. The eyes always seem to breathe life into whatever I am working on, so I like to save them for the very end. Here are the final pics (click to view larger):

Overall, I probably have eight hours into this project, which is more than I have ever spent on a minimate project. I think the only custom project I have put more time into was my Bates Mansion from Psycho. But it was well worth the time spent. I am very happy with how he turned out. I might even go crazy and modify the Sentinel some day too!

I hope you enjoyed this post! If you have a tough custom in the works, consider documenting the process and I will post it here at the Factory.

In Part 1 of this series, I showed you how I came up with a way to display one 3-inch and four 2-inch minimates together in one package. This entry is going to focus on creating the packaging graphics using Photoshop. If you are a beginner with Photoshop, you might want to read my Decal Design Using Photoshop Tutorial first, as it describes many of the tools that you will see mentioned in this article.

My first step was to measure the physical packaging using a ruler. This was a difficult package to measure because the sides slope in slightly towards the top, and the front also slopes in towards the top. I ended up unfolding the packaging, which involved detaching some glued sections,  and tracing it out on paper. It was easier to measure the lengths and angles this way. I added 1/16″ to all sides to account for the corners being slightly rounded when folding.

In Photoshop, I created a document that was slightly larger than the package. I hit Ctrl-R to bring up my rulers, and I used the polygonal lasso tool to outline each section of my package layout, and the paint bucket tool to fill the sections in with black. I kept the sides and bottom as separate layers.

I found some high resolution artwork online with the Sinestro Corps logo on it, and I brought it into Photoshop. I traced the outline with the polygonal lasso tool and pasted it in a new layer in my packaging file. I traced the Minimates logo from one of the posters on the Art Asylum web site. To make it all white, I hit Ctrl-U to bring up my Hue/Saturation tool, and I adjusted the lightness all the way to the maximum.

Since the team is called Sinestro Corps, Sinestro is sort of the focal point of the set, so I wanted him to be at the top of the packaging. I traced an image of Sinestro from this artwork, and pasted it on a new layer in my file. I right-clicked on my Minimates logo layer, and under blending options, I gave it a black stroke. I used a rectangular marquee to select a section of the packaging, and then I added and removed parts of it with the elliptical marquee too to make it slightly rounded on the top and bottom. I gave it a gradient that went from orange to yellow.

I copied in some of the background artwork from the Sinestro page I linked to above, and put it behind the main logos. I brightened it, erased around the edges, and changed its blending option from normal to overlay. Then I added in some more wavy lines with a yellow brush with a low opacity and flow rate.

Underneath the header, I wanted something explosive, so why not use an explosion? I used a wallpaper found here as the center image. I overlayed it on top of itself a few times, and erased the parts I didn’t need, to make it the shape I wanted. I added a lens blur, and I changed the hue and saturation to what you see above.

For the sides, I pasted in the outlines of the photos I took of the customs. Under the blending options for each one, I gave them an outer glow. The motion lines behind them are from a motion blur I made of a star-shaped object with the perspective changed and the tail end blurred. Finally, I added a generic starry sky background behind them, and the front of the package was finished!

I started off the back of the package with an image of Sinestro traced from this wallpaper. I wanted to make it look like he was creating the Minimates himself. I used the Flare Effects Plug-in to make the light beams behind him. I also gave him an outer glow.

I added in the Minimates, and once again gave them an outer glow in the blending options tool. I created more flares behind Sinestro, and bent them towards the Minimates using the warp tool. I added the logos from the front of the package, repositioned to balance the design. I decided I didn’t want the light beams behind him, so I removed them. I wanted something with a bit more kick…

How about the sun? Instead of the light beams, I used this image of the sun as a background behind everything, with a few modifications to its lightness, hue, and saturation. And finally, I added my logo and the DC logo, which you can see in the final product photos below. After I printed the package on some glossy cardstock paper, I assembled it in the exact same way as my Death of Captain America packaging article. I haven’t really changed anything about the way I assemble these since that article, which was almost a year ago. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

I hope you enjoyed this post! Thanks for reading!