Introducing the Fwooshnet.com Guide to Customizing
Welcome to the Fwooshnet.com Guide to Customizing (FGC), a guide that will be a service to any customizer, beginner to expert. The guide will draw on the experience from the staff as well as many of the customizers and professionals in the field of toy making.
Let’s first define what we mean by customizing. Customizing is the act of making your own private action toy. There are many methods to doing this but we are focusing on 3 major methods. Painting, Fabrication, and Scratchbuilding. Since we focus on action figures we are going to use "action figure" instead of "toy".
Painting your own figure is the simplest form of making your own toy. It requires the toymaker to take an existing figure and simply repainting it to represent the figure of his/her choice. As with any aspect of making homemade toys there are advanced methods, and these will be covered in later chapters.
Fabricating your own custom action figure simply means taking existing action figures and piecing them together to make the figure of your choice. There are advanced methods of fabrication but for the beginner this means simply swapping heads between figures using boil and pop, or swapping out hands, arms, etc.
Scratchbuilding action figures is an advanced level of homemade toymaking. The toymaker has to be able to make his/her own joints, sculpt the figure, and paint it—all without the use of an existing toy*. We do not recommend this for beginners and intermediates, and will be writing the chapters for the advanced homemade toymaker.
We hope this guide will help any newcomer to the hobby make their own toy.
*There are some cheats that are accepted in the professional world that will be covered.