I didn’t sculpt the head, but did embellish the chin and hair slightly of a soldier figure made by Dragon Toys. It was called “P-40 Pilot ‘Ben’,” meaning they’d made an Affleck likeness under the table, so to speak. They’ve done the same for Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, Brad Pitt, and probably some other big stars. I like Dragon Toys, heh. Anyway, the shirt is just material from a deep red T-shirt. The pants and shoes came from one of those 12” “Gentlemen” figures from Buffy. Those floating, grinning guys. They wore black suits and shoes.

The armor (breastplate, backplate) was sculpted in Sculpey. I just lay a thin piece over the chest and back and conformed to the “muscles” of the doll body. Discovering the hard way that Sculpey isn’t as strong as I’d like, I ended up casting the two pieces in resin. Many botched paint jobs later with chrome spraypaint, I found some bare metal foil and laid it over the pieces with little trouble.

The shoulder guards, after several botched attempts, were finally made from a super-super thin sheet of plastic, cut into the appropriate shapes and glued together in layers. I bent some sheet brass into the rounded shape and glued the plastic to that, then covered it all in bare metal foil. The chainmail is made from a nylon mesh, spraypainted chrome and just glued into place.

The wings – ah, yes, the wings. Many years ago I bought some very small socket joints. I have no idea what they’re really for, but I kept them, and ended up using 4 of them. Two to attach to the backplate and 2 to make the bend in the wings. The wings’ framework was made from those and brass tubes. I glued some fabric between them and started gluing feathers one by one to the framework until I ended up with wings. The wings were meant to be able to fold in and expand, but eventually there was too much material applied, so that’s out. But they can still be positioned because of the joints in the backplate.

Hello,

My name is Alf (last name and rank witheld, yet still a proud member of the U.S. Air Force). I’m a pilot in the U.S. Air Force. I was recently deployed overseas, flying missions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom(OEF). Last year before I left, I visited your website and saw that I could get a Buddy Christ(BC). Long story short, I took BC with me to my deployment location, and BC flew with me and my crew on all of our missions, including ones for OEF (including on Day 1 of the war). I can’t tell you where we flew into, but just know that BC has been into some pretty interesting fields.

I’ve attached a few pictures I took of BC on the “dashboard” of my C-130. I wish I would have taken more photos where you could either see we were airborne or the unique terrain of certain countries. But I do like the shots of BC amongst the clouds (where he belongs).

Well that’s about it. I hope you enjoy the pictures. Thank you so much for making BC available. It brought much needed comic relief in very crucial times. He also became the mascot of my crew, which brought us closer so that we were able to work together efficiently. Every other crew was so jealous.

Keep the laughs coming. God bless the U.S.A. Go Air Force.

Sincerely
Alf (last name and rank witheld)