Hey there! SpyMagician here!
Like our fearless leader, Julius Marx, I am a HUGE fan of Disney Pixar’s Cars! And I finally got around to doing a custom "figure" I’ve been meaning to make for ages… Now I love my real car, a Black Cherry Pearl ’05 Scion xA.
So what would be cooler than a toy xA toy done in the style of the Cars Movie? Now a diecast of my car is not that common, most Scion toys are of the xB. But in Japan there are a few toys of the Toyota ist, the Japanese version of my xA.
So I finally tracked one down and finally could start my project! Step 1: The first step was to disassemble the toy , sand it a bit for repainting (I was fortunate that the original Ist Diecast was silver, so I didn’t need strip the paint, I’d just paint right over the silver) and sculpt the 2 key details, the Cars Movie style eyebrow and mouth.
To do this I needed some putty that could be sculpted but would adhere to diecast. I was in new territory here as my normal work involves action figures that are all plastic so I can use polymer clays. In this case I found some Quicksteel Putty at Pep Boys. It sets VERY FAST however, so I only had about 5-10 minutes to do the sculpt!!! Unlike with Sculpey, which won’t set until you heat cure it, giving you hours and hours to work the sculpt, I had to do a quick rough sculpt and finish the rest by carving and sanding. The Quicksteel sanded very well though, and I got a good seamless bond to the metal. To sculpt the eyebrow, I used some more Quicksteel Putty and sculpted right onto the plastic windshield after removing it from the car body. This was much easier as it was a simple shape. Step 2: Step 2 required that I paint the body and eyebrow in the Black Cherry Pearl metallic paint. I checked Pep Boys for the exact color but it was not avaiable but I found a similar color. It’s a touch darker than my actual car but not so much that it doesn’t work.
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As many of you know I was a HUGE fan of Playing Mantis’ holiday "Memory Lane" lines of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Peanuts lines back in the day. As a result theirs was always one of my favorite showrooms to visit each year at Toy Fair, not just to see the new product, but for the elaborate displays they would build each year. A few years back Playing Mantis was sold to RC2/Ertl and the lines lasted a year past that, but eventually . 
