Droids Custom Madine: On sale WEDNESDAY!

by Bill Cable
on 2024-11-18, 09:17:43

I finished my Droids Custom General Madine run on Saturday. They'll go on sale Wednesday. If you couldn't care less about the story how I accomplished this Herculean task, you can skip to the ordering instructions in the last paragraph.

I had completed my Madine art the previous week, so all I needed to do was drop the art onto my template and make sure it looked good:

And man... it looks GOOD! So next I needed to figure out what color to make the bubble backdrop. I played around with a few ideas:

My first thought was to match the color of his shirt sleeves, but when I placed the figure on that background the sleeves just vanished. So I decided to use something more complimentary. The orange popped decently enough, but it made the figure's complexion and the faces on the art look pallid. So I tried matching the hue of the pink in the sky. It really popped! But pink? I hadn't done a pink background before. Was it too much? I decided no, it wasn't. And if any Star Wars character was manly enough to pull off a pink background, it was Crix Madine!

The next thing I needed to do was prepare the coins. And this time I was facing something I never had before - aluminum!

In the past I've either used actual Droids coins (early on when they cost me < $5 each), or resin casts of Yehuda's POTF coin collection. But last year I was given some custom aluminum coins by Mark Huber for Madine and Nein Nunb. I was a bit worried working with a new material, but they turned out even nicer than I could have hoped!

I only barely had enough paint left to finish them, so I gotta grab another can next time I stop by the art supply store.

Normally when I build my customs I give myself 2 days to do it. Cards on Saturday, and bubbles on Sunday. But late last week it dawned on me - I'm not gonna have Sunday free because the Steelers were playing the Ravens at 1pm. My only hope of getting these on sale as planned was to complete everything on Saturday! I figured out everything I could prep ahead of time to speed things up.

First, I scrubbed my Madine figures clean:

Then I trimmed the card fronts to size:

Finally, I taped the coins and weapons onto the bubbles, and I pre-taped the sides:

I couldn't fully tape the bubbles because for that I lift up the backing paper and it'd expose the surfaces to dust and debris. But the sides are the real time-consuming part of the process... lining them up near the edge as precisely as possible. So this saved me a lot of time.

Saturday morning at 9:30am I got to work! That involved gluing the backs of the cards to a comic book backer, trimming to size (6" x 9"), and then gluing on the front and trimming off the bleed.

All that was left was to attach the bubbles:

And with that, I was done! Almost...

As I was placing one of the bubbles my hands slipped and it wasn't aligned properly. So I tried lifting it off to reset it. And in doing so, I slightly messed up the "General Madine" text at the bottom. At first I felt the flaw was so minor nobody would ever notice it. But after sleeping on it, I decided I would notice it, so I had to fix it. I realized I wouldn't need to start from scratch... I could just glue a new front sheet on top the existing one. So just before the Steelers kicked off, I ripped off the bubble and fixed the card. Now someone out there gets a secret double-front Madine!

Ordering Instructions:

My Droids General Madine custom will go on sale Wednesday, November 20th, just after 9:30am Eastern (New York) time. I will post instructions for ordering right here on CreatureCantina.com. I highly recommend you bookmark CreatureCantina.com and start tapping refresh on the site until the instructions appear. If you wait until I share the instructions on Facebook, it's likely they'll already be sold out when you see them in your feed. They'll be sold first-com, first-served and I'll reply as quickly as possible letting you know if you got one and how to pay. Good luck, and I hope to see you back Wednesday!