About Andy

Hi. I'm Andy.

I started making my own action figures in either 1993 or 1994, after seeing my cousin touch up some of the chipped paint on his X-Men toys, using model paints. I went home and did the same to all of my figures that had chipped white paint, using White-Out. Not exactly the best of solutions, but I was young.

My very first custom figure -- a "grey" Hulk -- was made later that week, by re-painting a 1991 Toy Biz Marvel Super Heroes line Incredible Hulk figure all white, using white-out and outlining his muscles and coloring in his hair with a black Sharpie marker. Again, not exactly elegant, but it worked well enough for me. Besides, what was I going to do with two Hulks?

Over the next couple years, I started buying model paints with more regularity, and touching up X-Men or Ninja Turtles figures in my collection, or updating the outfits of the X-Men to match what they were currently wearing in the comics. I also attempted making some original characters, with varying degrees of success. Sadly, many of these early attempts have been lost to the sands of time, and I haven't seen these figures in years.

In the late '90s, I made friends with a kid in my high school class who customized wrestling figures. I thought this was a really cool idea, and began doing the same, myself. Over the next three years, he and I had made nearly every wrestler on the WWF, WCW, and ECW rosters in a variety of styles and outfits. During this time, I began experimenting with doing more than just re-painting figures, and started swapping arms and legs, heads, torsos, etc., as well as sculpting and re-sculpting details on figures.

As time went on and the action figure industry evolved, I went back to making superhero and comic-based action figures, focusing on learning new painting and other customizing techniques.

In the last few years, I've made a handful of custom action figures as commissions, and have decided to open this up to a full-fledged small business. If you like my work and would like a figure of your own, please contact me, and we'll see what we can work out!

All content and photographs © 1994-2011 "Psycho" Andy Costello, unless otherwise noted. All characters ©, ®, and ™ their respective owners.