Once I committed to making custom Green Lantern figures, and, in particular, started getting heavy into making female Green Lanterns to help even out the gender disparity in my Green Lantern Corps collection, I always knew Laira would be a Green Lantern I'd build. I also knew she'd probably be one of the last, since it was obvious most of her body parts would not be easily obtainable and repaintable parts. It took me a long time to figure out how to build this one.

First, I had to get the head. I'd need wisps of hair in the front, and a ponytail in the back. I looked around through the heads I knew of out there, from Justice League, Young Justice, various Kenner lines, what I knew of Toybiz... nothing existed that had the right look. I could find a head with the wisps of hair in front, but there'd be long free-flowing hair in the back, or I could find a head with ALL hair tightly pulled back into a ponytail. Finally, I reluctantly came to accept that I would have to modify and create a head of my own. I ordered a couple of JLU female head castings to fiddle around with, finally settling on the head of the Shayera Hol figure. In the front, it looked right, and I figured it'd probably be a lot easier to sculpt a ponytail on the back, than it would be to sculpt delicate little wisps of hair on a ponytail head. First I very carefully sanded off Shayera Hol's long hair in the back, feeling paranoid and being ever careful to not accidentally destroy the head. Once the back of the head had a rounded, hair-tyed look, I drilled a hole in the back of the head, then cut a length of 16 gauge solid wire and Gorilla Glued it into the hole. This gave me a posable basis for creating a ponytail. In most pictures of Laira I found, her ponytail is high up on her head, but in the image I've used in this listing it's down low, so I opted to build the figure with the ponytail somewhere in the middle, as a sort of compromise. I also noticed that in virtually every picture I've ever seen of Laira, her ponytail is whipping around through the air for some reason, so I decided to sculpt her ponytail to reflect that. I bent the wire into an appropriate shape, then sculpted Magic Sculpt over it and etched in hair-like details. Lastly, I drilled a hole at the bottom of the head to accommodate a ball joint, since I knew I would be using a Young Justice body.

So I thought that was the hard part, but I soon found out there'd be more challenges. I was originally going to use a Miss Martian torso since I had one laying around, but I thought it made Laira look way too waify... and Laira's body is one of her best aspects... so I tore apart another Black Canary figure and used her torso instead. Though better, I still didn't think the torso was quite curvy enough, but I didn't know of any better torso to use. I didn't want to use a Justice League torso, since they look like crap. I was using a pair of Justice League female legs, so I had to sand down the Black Canary torso to more smoothly match the legs. That just left the arms. I was originally going to use a pair of heavily sanded-down Black Canary arms, since I found out the hard way that female Justice League arms look like crap, but I decided those would be perfect for the Soranik Natu custom I was working on. I could have just grabbed another pair for use with Laira, but I made a conscious decision to build all my female figures with bodies that were as unique as possible, not wanting them to all look like repaints of the same body (as the Justice League toyline looks) so I went with a pair of heavily sanded down Karen Ross arms. They were a little bit big in comparison to the rest of the figure's fairly petite body, and I had to sand down the tops of the shoulders to make them properly fit the torso, but the arms succeeded brilliantly in having a unique (and not awkward) pose that clearly make them look unique to the figure, and I knew with a little paint added, would blend in well with the figure.

So at this point I had the head sculpted and painted, the torso painted with the basic purple skin and green suit, and all four limbs painted purple. It looked good when assembled, all I had to do was paint on the details and finish up the figure. I had a busted Pirates of the Caribbean figure lying around that I'd gotten in a lot of figures from Ebay that I wasn't going to do anything with anyway, so I hacked off his swordstrap, cut off the crap I didn't need, then bent it around into a beltloop, put some Gorilla Glue on it and clamped it. When it was dry, I had a solid, removable belt that hung loosely off of Laira's hip like it did in the comics, all I had to do was paint it red. I took a little artistic liberty and painted the buckle green, since I liked the way it looked.

At this point, when I was so close to being done, I realized I had no idea how to make Laira's boots. They have these fronts that extend up from the front of the lower boot and aren't actually connected to the leg. I had no idea how to build that. I couldn't find another pair of legs that looked anywhere remotely similar, so that was out. I knew I could have just painted bootlines around the legs, but that would be cheating, so I didn't want to do that either. So my project stalled, and I thought long and hard on how finish my figure. I ended up buying some new pots and some heavy bricks, and I ended up experimenting with shaping plastic. I still wasn't sure what to do though, so then I got to thinking about using cocktail stirrers, but I couldn't find any that were quite right. Finally, it dawned on me. Slurpee straws. So I drove down to the local 7-11, got myself a Slurpee and a conspicuous amount of Slurpee straws, then headed back home and got to it. I still had to trim down the spoons at the end of the straws, and I cut off most of the actual straw, leaving just enough to cut in back and wrap around the leg, then I wrapped very thin strips of tape around the straw to keep it held on, then continued wrapping the tape all the way around the leg until it reached about the foot. As an added bonus, this gave the boots a very textured look which I really liked.

So, with the last of the hard parts tackled, I painted on the last of the details, gloves, boots, etc., added the Green Lantern insignia, then sprayed Dullcote, and then acrylic sealant, and then glued the figure all together. I had to glue in two places this time, once with the standard squirt of hotglue between the two halves of torso to keep them held together, and a second time into the neck-hole of the head, to make the head better grip the balljoint. I also recently discovered that the Green lantern insignia sticker wasn't staying on well for some reason (this is why it appears slightly crooked in a few of the pictures) so I've since reapplied it with the addition of a hint of Gorilla Glue.

Overall, I really like the way this figure came out. The head looks great, the boots look awesome, and I did a very solid job on the painting this time. That said, I will probably be making a second attempt at building this figure from scratch (as I did with Soranik Natu) just because there are some features I want to experiment with and attempt to make better. For one, I'd like to try building this figure with a much more shapely and buxom torso- the Black Canary torso has beautiful lines and curvature, but it's far too slender for Laira's rocking body. I'd also like to experiment with building the figure to have multiple removable ponytails the next time around, much like how I built my G'nort figure with an option of multiple removable tails, so to have increased options for better poses. Still, I'm very pleased with this one, and with this one done, I'm finally done with my initial batch of female Green Lantern figures!

Of course, I do have a half-done Aya figure lying around, and the girlfriend's kid made me promise to build Princess Iolande, and I'd kinda like to build R'amey Holl down the road... but for now I'm done.