General Obi Wan Kenobi
When I was a kid, my imagination ran wild with the whole Clone Wars thing. A throwaway line from my favorite movie, and it pretty much grew to a massive epic, featuring thousands of Jedi fighting a bunch of guys in Boba Fett armor, while also fighting badass Dark Jedi, all in a desperate attempt to save the Republic from destruction. The creation of Darth Vader, the origins of the Mandalorian armor that Fett wore (was he a former Stormtrooper, and if not, what was his story?), and a whole lot of Jedi getting slaughtered against the backdrop of epic battles and destruction. I guess we kind of got this stuff in the prequels, but it just didn't seem as cool as what I imagined. It was all just so "meh"...which I guess could be attributed to the fact that I was, like, seven years old when I first worked myself up into a tizzy, and now I'm in my mid-twenties.
But I digress. For a while now, I've been toying with the idea of creating figures of characters from the Clone Wars that completely ignores the prequels and attempts to explore stuff that I would have liked to see. Obviously, I can't completely divorce my mind from the films, and the fact is I like Grievous and I like a lot of the Jedi character designs...but for this figure, I was looking more for a badass, armored and ready for battle Obi Wan.
The base figure is Theoden. I initially tried to rework the armor he had, but it was too bulky and too recognizable as Theoden's armor, so after wasting some time and epoxy putty, I simply removed the pieces of armor and built my own using styrene. Its actually very similar to Theoden's torso armor, but I made the design more angular and a little more industrial looking. I wanted to evoke a medieval knight, but I also wanted it to look like it could be some sort of retro-futuristic suit.
The Bernard Hill likeness is pretty good, which works against me separating the face from the character. But, I also saw a bit of Alec Guinness in the sculpt, so I tried to paint the face and eyes to look like Obi Wan from the first trilogy, but perhaps a bit younger (not too young though).
The idea that I had for this figure was that Jedi, while powerful, are not superheroes either, and would benefit from wearing protective gear in battle. I thought about making the armor white, but I want to save that for an idea I'm cooking up for a Clone Trooper. In this case, I decided that the black, tarnished armor was simple and functional, and that Kenobi had seen plenty of action throughout the war. He is, after all, a general.
Let me know what you think, and thanks for looking.
