SONIC LAMPREY 1990

Figure number 16 is the Sonic Fighter version of Lamprey. Lamprey was always a cool figure but the neon orange Sonic Fighter version was pretty hard to look at. At first I had intended to color this figure like an Eels, with a gray suit and red life vest but it was a bit bland and before I actually began painting him I realized there was a far better and more fitting option that I had completely overlooked. Though this figure is in the Sonic Fighter line, he doesn't actually have any sonic weaponry and his file card doesn't even mention sonic stuff. This version of Lamprey is actually a sort of shore patrol guy for Cobra Island, in effect he is the perfect infantry to operate out of a BUGG since he and Secto-Viper both do the same job. I had forgotten about this detail completely when I came up with this guys color scheme and so I had to rethink things.

Shore patrol type units use the color scheme of Copperhead, as was shown on the previous Secto-Viper custom, and this figure was a perfect candidate. I wasn't sure how it would look at first but in the end it seemed to fit and stand out far better than the basic Eels colors would have.

The body was pretty straight forward with a teal jumpsuit and black for his life vest, belt and weapon holsters. Since he doesn't have many details, I had to use the zippers and shoulder pockets to distribute the lime green over his body without being too overpowering. The boots had to be black and I was going to use lime green for the gloves, but it just looked out of place so I went with black instead and it looked much better. A silver buckle added a little bit of brightness to the midline.

The shape of the helmet made it pretty difficult to mirror Copperheads color layout so I had to experiment a bit with it. I was thinking about making the visor dome silver with the respirator teal, and the sun visor on top in lime green, but it just didn't have the right feel for the sun visor not being a dark color, and I wasn't really comfortable using a silver faceplate in the end since that's more of a Viper thing.

I decided to change the sun visor to black and then try the teal for the respirator since most of Copperheads helmet is teal, then use the lime on the visor dome. I liked the look of that much more than the silver. I still wanted to try a color reverse with a lime respirator and teal dome, but this ended up looking rather unbalanced so for the actual paint job I went back to the teal respirator and lime visor dome.

The final touches amounted to painting in the little black vents on his helmet and adding a silver Cobra logo in the same position as the original Sonic Lamprey.

Now he will fit in a lot better with Copperhead and re-colored Secto-Viper when they are patrolling the coasts and marshes, and he won't be sniper bait quite so much.

Figure: Sonic Lamprey 1990
Scheme: Shore Patrol
Notes: My camera reacted with this teal color acrylic paint and made it look a bit dark and mottled for some reason. It had no effect on Copperhead's teal parts. I attempted to lighten it in photoshop with limited success.