1998 Lady Jaye

If you look at my current work you might pick up on some trends. I'm trying to make my customs invisible. I want other collectors to look at them and try to remember when that came out. I don't want them to look like customs, I want them to look like Hasbro produced toys that fit in perfectly with the vintage toy line.

I'm also doing something I like to call "Retro Engineering." Sort of like Reverse Engineering, but instead of taking something old to make something new, I'm taking something new to make something old. Both Hasbro and the Club have make a lot of new characters, and new versions of existing characters in the Modern era that were never part of the vintage line. That's were I'm drawing my inspiration.

In this case, for my Night Force Night Lancer driver, I'm drawing from the 2013 JoeCon Night Force Lady Jaye. Initially my intention was to paint a vintage Lady Jaye in the JoeCon color scheme. But when you really look at that figure it's kind of disappointing. It's just a normal Lady Jaye but . . . darker. In the mean time, I had been experimenting with removing paint from figures, and spotted the mostly black 1998 Lady Jaye, and realized that her "camouflage" overspray might be fairly easy to remove. Turns out it was. A few days with some vinegar and a tooth brush got rid of about 85% of the white. A light spray coat of black took care l the rest.

So now I had a mostly black Lady Jaye, and that was more interesting to me than a darker green Lady Jaye. So instead of a straight replication of the Club's version, I decided to invert the color scheme. I used the Club's Night Force green on the straps and hat, accented the figure with some Tan for more interest, a few appropriate spots of silver, and BAM! she's ready to drive the Night Lancer into battle. And the colors fit right into the vintage line.