I’ve gotten some recommendations for a painter on FB 1/6 action figure groups and at Sideshow Collectors. To be completely honest, when I look at some of the artists’ FB and Instagram pages, I’m not blown away. I’m sure that some pics reflect works in progress, and sharing attempts that don’t pan out (in which case presumably they have another go at it until they achieve a satisfactory result). But for most of them I’m not seeing many examples of super high quality work.
I need to be selective here and hire a painter that can deliver exceptional results. The paint job for the head sculpt makes or breaks the overall result. At a minimum I want this head sculpt to rival Hot Toys in its accuracy to the source (here working from two portraits for a computer game).
Or, well, honestly, for what I’ll be paying it really should be even better since Hot Toys sometimes misses the mark!
Anyway, I found one artist, Michael Ang, whose work looks pretty darn good from the pics he’s posted.
He quoted me a standard price of $185. He’s the only one whose work impressed me enough to inquire about a quote. My guess is that $185 is then probably going to be about the going price for a custom paint job of a head sculpt. But I’ll find out as I inquire about it from some other artists, when I see portfolios that inspire confidence that they’ll deliver superb results.
I did see a really impressive example from an artist Yelim Choi,
and I will reach out to her. But according to someone at Sideshow Collectibles she’s not taking orders until Q3 of this year. In a way, that would actually work out for me, though! Because I started out with this project kind of wanting this figure to be my Christmas present from Santa this year. Like even if I had the figure assembled and ready for display, my thought has been to still put it away and wait to open in on Christmas morning, lol.
One Sixth Baldur's Gate 