Tiger Force Recondo

I've wanted to customize Digger from the Australian release of the comic book for a while now. Thought it he would make a great driver for a VAMP, and being Australian, Action Force seemed to make more sense than G.I. Joe.
The simple route would have just been to change the hair color of a regular Recondo and be don with it. After all that's pretty much how he appears on the cover of the comic. But I was already working on my Z-Force Dingo, and Digger seemed like the perfect driver. That meant Z-Force colors.

And it just so happens that Tiger Force Recondo is already mostly in Z-Force colors.

Normally I prefer to paint pretty much the entire figure, but his base colors were already a dead match for what I wanted. I didn't have to even touch the torso. I took him apart, and sanded off as much of the yellow tiger striping as possible. Then I painted new black camo, starting with any remaining yellow spots. I was able to pop of the hat pretty easily. That made it easy to spray paint the hat in Z-Force red like several of his teammates, and paint the hair blond. A clear coat disguised the remaining sanding marks.
I finished him off with a reproduction sticker for the shoulder patch.

On this project I was trying to think like the designer. And part of that is cost cutting. Reusing what you can. Obviously Palitoy did a lot of this. Jammer is largely just Stalker with recolored paint apps. While Steeler and SAS Stalker were changed mostly by adding paint apps. That was the approach I wanted to take here. Even though Tiger Force Recondo would have come later, I thought maybe the Palitoy designers would have taken that figure and just tweaked him a bit to fit into Z-Force, rather than starting from scratch on the paint deco's.