Although I played a lot of PC games in the 2000s, I never played Tomb Raider. Still, Lara Croft became such a ubiquitous pop culture icon back then that there was no way around her. When the first Tomb Raider movie came out in 2001, my friends and I (in the midst of puberty) naturally went to the movies. We had quite a bit of fun, even though it was a rather bad movie. Consequently, I never saw the sequel. But I still saw the first movie once or twice. It was probably that pubescent teenager in me that made me buy the DVD. After all, Angelina Jolie was clearly Lara Croft brought to life. So I did indeed have an excuse, didn’t I?
Here again the training scene for an impression:
Time moves on. Apparently, Lara Croft has changed a lot in the games, both as a character and in appearance. Ms. Croft on the big screen is affected as well. I feel like Lara is not as iconic today, which may be related to these changes. From what I know about the current development of Tomb Raider, these changes are very welcome to me. Still, I haven’t played the games and I haven’t seen the new movie incarnation yet. At some point I’ll make up for the latter, if only because there are some really nice miniatures of the “new” Lara Croft that I’ll have to paint at some point.
Lara Croft miniature
Back to the 90s: because of that iconic pop culture status back then, I wanted to paint a miniature of her. There are a few minis available, some more game related, some more movie related. I decided to go with the version available from Studio Miniatures. Originally, I was going to paint her right away because I was a little tired of painting black suits or dark colors and I wanted to paint Lara’s classic blue top and brown shorts. Then I realized that Angelina Jolie never wore that in the movies, so I had to go back to a black outfit after all. Damn!
In any case, I had a lot of fun painting again, it’s a nice model that required almost no cleanup. I didn’t really like her face though, which looked a little strange from the modeling and even stranger with my colors on it. I tried to fix that a bit by painting eyebrows, which is usually a bad idea for faces that size. You just can’t paint them the size they need to be (very thin) – or at least I can’t. Somehow, I’m still quite happy with the result. So, long story short, this is my attempt at a Lara Croft (Jolie version).
