Funko Pop Alert! Shane & Ilya from Heated Rivalry

May 12, 2022

So I recently read Rachel Reid’s gay hockey romance duo Heated Rivalry and it’s newly published sequel The Long Game. If you read my review(s) a couple posts down, you’ll know that I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THEM. And I ADORED the characters. So…

In Heated Rivalry, Shane plays for the Montreal Voyageurs and Ilya for the Boston Bears. I googled those teams to see what I could find in the way of logos and uniforms. Neither of them are actual NHL teams. The Voyageurs were an AHL team for a while but no longer exist. The Boston Bears, as far as I can tell, have never existed in any form. There is an AHL team in Hershey Pennsylvania called the Bears and of course there are the NHL’s Boston Bruins. And the Bruins, of course, are bears so that’s the team I decided to go with for Ilya’s uniform.

Below are the logos I went with. I altered the Voyageurs logo slightly to remove some stylistic points on the letter M. To the Bruins logo, I merely added a bear’s head where the B usually is to make it different.

I could have gone with the logical real life counterpart to the Montreal Voyageurs (as I did with Boston) which would be the Montreal Canadiens - and their colors are actually red & blue so it would have worked really well with the logo I found - but I wanted a pop body that was standing upright and found Auston Matthews from the Toronto Maple Leafs and liked the solid blue.

Here’s the mock-up I created to see how my ideas would look. I think they turned out pretty close. I’m really happy with them.

In the book, Shane’s hair is described as short but floppy (paraphrasing) and he has freckles. Unfortunately the head I wanted to use did not have freckles so I did my best applying them by hand. (Or rather, by toothpick.) And Ilya has shaggy golden blonde hair (long enough to tie back at one point) and some scruff and this particular head/hairstyle was merely my preference among the pops I found. The one I used for Ilya’s head didn’t have scruff so I painted on the beard myself. So many new things I had to do with these pops!! Scary!

Here’s the pops I used to create both:

I also had to change the names and numbers on the backs of their uniforms, which was kind of a nightmare. According to the books, Shane’s number is 24 and Ilya’s is 81. And, well, let’s just say hand painting small detail is NOT my forte. So I did my best but won’t be doing that again. For the logos, I printed them, cut them out, and applied them by brushing on Elmer’s glue. Worked beautifully. That’s how I should have handled the names and numbers as well but every new set has a learning curve and I did my best. I do think I will be going back and fixing them though.

I have plans to make a set for The Long Game as well. I would have had them done by now but because of the parts I chose, I’m waiting on a pop that’s being released in September so it will be a while longer. Stay tuned…