[Joeness]

Outback can survive for weeks in the harshest terrain, living off nothing but roots and bugs if he has to. He can make a shelter out of an old tin cup and find water in a dry rock, and he knows there is only one weapon that can withstand the rugged wilderness alongside him, come mud, sand or snow...

[Joeness]

Despite popular misconceptions, Tunnel Rat has never raided a cave complex carrying a massive backpack, armed with an MG34 machine gun, an oversized scope and full belt of ammo.

In fact, he travels light, dark, silent and deadly and in homage to his Vietnam-era predecessors, will not part with his reproduction jungle camo shirt. Rumor has it he's been honing his stealth skills by raiding Gung Ho's footlocker every night.

[Joeness]

Bazooka served from 1979 until the early 2000s before opening his own scrap iron business and becoming famous on "American Pickers". During his tenure in the Joes from the mid-eighties to the early nineties he was involved in covert ops from the Caribbean to the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, his trusty Terrycloth bands never leaving his wrists, and his favorite sports jersey needing frequent replacements.

[Dreadnok4life]

All of these are very cool. Great job.

[Joeness]

Snow Serpents are so cheap they'll use copied Finnish AKs, and so evil they adorn their uniforms with the pelts of endangered alpine wildlife.

[Joeness]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dreadnok4life

All of these are very cool. Great job.

For Bazooka I tried to think more like a toymaker: approximations of the camo but easy to paint with machines and attractive, bold colors. The six-color stones are bigger than the more 'realistic' scale I did for Leatherneck, for example, and the desert tans and browns are just a tad sharper than real life.

I also did a sort of production line on them: I used a plain khaki base for the helmet and pants then just painted layers of colored patches over it; I used the same helmet band, belt and wristbands for all three; to make the three-color pattern I just lifted the stones and a layer of dark brown off the six-color and left what was underneath. This is the kind of sneaky "repaint and release" Hasbro marketers were fond of anyway...

[Joeness]

Low light has a silencer and a telescopic thermal sight on his rifle, low glare goggles, night-vision baffling fatigues and a warm hat handed down by Beach Head. If you hear him coming at night, he's probably just breathing heavily...

[Joeness]

General Hawk took one look at Stalker and said, "Son you're covered in mud. Go get cleaned up and change into a fresh uniform!" He did as he was told then went right back out and got filthy again. Definitely not a barracks soldier...

[Joeness]

Aspen, Chamonix, Queenstown, Sapporo: Snow Job has a local girl in half a dozen ski towns and Lord knows how he finds time to visit them between deployments. Some of the Joes snickered at his nickname till they found out it's because he's had more action off-piste than a whole platoon of Snow Serpents put together.

[Joeness]

For Low Light, I actually superimposed and faded a print of the night desert camo from that era onto the body. Hand painting in PS looks more toy-like for the rest but that pattern was just too hard.

Some of the guns I've changed are not strictly Canon - I photoshopped together images of eighties Hasbro weapon models to create a sort of 'what if' that could still plausibly have been molded at the factory. I made a whole stable of CAR-15s - with stocks pushed in or pulled out, bayonets, grenade launchers, scopes, and suppressors as well as shorter and longer magazines; for Snow Job's marksman rifle, I made a PSG-1 out of the existing model with a soup can hanging off the bottom and ripcord's FAL. For the Snow Serpent's RK-62 I spliced the Cobra officer AK and a later FAL's stock.