Despite not being the most familiar with the Archie Sonic comic series, especially the pre-reboot continuity, I was always fond of the character, Mina Mongoose.

I've been wanting to get into doing custom Sonic figures for a long time, but things like being able to afford materials, getting the needed fodder(especially since the Jazwares Sonic figures in particular don't come for cheap after they lost the license), inexperience at the time, and just needing the free time to give it a try. Since Amy Rose is still one of the more affordable figures to get from the now out of production Jazwares line, and all of the research I have done for awhile now, I finally decided to take a whack at making custom articulated figures. I wanted to do this to see if I could actually do it and customize figures more complex than My Little Pony toys. This is my very first try at working with an articulated figure.

Like I said, I used a Jazwares Amy Rose as the base figure for Mina. Not only was Amy perfect for Mina and didn't require me to swap out any of her parts from other figures, but I thought Mina's character design in general would be fun to work with making a custom figure. I cut the torso in half and made it a little longer than what it originally was, mainly because the skirt would have made her look like she was wearing a dress instead of a separate skirt and top. I used Milliput Standard for filling things in and Milliput Superfine for more sculpting intensive work. I tried to sand things down as smooth as possible after the putty cured. Her "hair" was made using left over hair pieces from an Equestria Girls Minis Rainbow Dash. Her skirt was made from a Twilight Sparkle from the same previously mentioned toyline, and I took the left-over pieces I cut off when shortening the skirt to make the green parts of Mina's cuffs. I had to mix together a special blend of colors of paint in order to get shade of green and purple I needed. I drilled in a hole just big enough to fit a mic in her left "peace" hand, because she is a singer after all. I'm not the best when it comes to painting on dreaded eyelashes, even when using the finest brushes or a toothpick, and this just convinced me to try out using Prisma Color Pencils and Watercolor Faber Castels for eye and eyelash work next time.

I took some liberties with Mina's character design, here. I wanted to try and make her fit more into the Sega Sonic character design guidelines, and also make the Punk aspect a little more prevalent. I tried to make her "hair" look more like it's actually just a part of her fur, which is why the purple goes beyond her "hair" on the head, why there's a purple stripe running down her back(not pictured here), and why I made her tail purple and more like an actual mongoose tail.