I thought Mattel’s Ares movie BAF looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it until I put a flaming sword in his hand. He’s the ideal base for a Shadow King! Did it have a fleece draped over his shoulder (that I pried off) because someone conflated Ares with Aires? There is something primally satisfying about gluing googly eyes into the sockets of Ares’s helm. I surgically recofigured it into Shadow King’s face. For not having a glorious David Thewlis moustache, I gouged out the stupid shadowy visage within the former helmet. His tongue was carved from a piece of resin & inserted through his new face aperture. The spikes were leftovers from some resin models. Klompen-size knight shoes were sculpted over Ares’s tiny bare feet. The original paint job was nice by Mattel standards, but I obscured it with coats of lovely metallic sapphire. (Ideally I would’ve transmuted the whole thing into trasnlucent blue plastic.) It’s tricksy to get consistent reference images for this look despite it being Shadow King’s best, so I gave myself additional creative license.