Hammerstein
I guess i'm with most in thinking the
best thing in the Dredd film was the "ABC War
Robot" - nicely rendered and pretty faithful to Old
Red Eye's in most ways. After the films release, a vinyl
kit was produced of the chap which normally i would have
snapped up but the naff pose put me off - he's looking
off to the right with the right arm raised to fire his
wrist guns... just wrong, wrong, wrong.
However, the good old ABC Warrors came
back to the prog along with the re-release of their first
graphic novel so i got fired up over all things ABC. I
found the kit going cheap so figured i'd have a go at
turning him into a more faithful version.
HEAD
First thing was to move the head. What
really went in my favour was that the kit is vinyl (same
stuff doll's head's are made of) and, after warming up
with a hairdryer, cuts very easily. I severed the neck
just above the shoulders and turned the head to the front
and superglued it in place. This left a huge gap at the
sides and back, with none of the cable detailing matching
up. I plugged the gaps with modelling putty and to cover
that up i used a mains cable, cut it open and used just
the plastic covering to the wires, snipped to size and
glued in place. The trick here is to keep all the new
lengths of wire in scale with the sculpted one's and not
to have anything that stands out too much.
ARMS
I reposed the arms pretty easily just
by moving them around and down. Once glued in place i
didn't have to bother with puttying as his shoulder pads
come seperately and they covered up everything i'd done
nicely.
I sculpted a hammer from Super Sculpy,
making sure it was nice and beat up, attached it to the
right wrist and junked the hand. The left arm looked kind
of dull so i raided my spare kit parts box and cobbled
together a gun from some Anime robot parts (since been
told it looks like a hairdryer but what the hey).
Finishing off
At the start of the project i was
toying with the idea of sculpting a helmet as i prefer
him with it. Trouble is, it has the same hurdle that
Johnny Alpha's and Nemesis' head have- things that look
great in 2D are a swine to duplicate in 3D. So i left it
off (maybe i'll go back to it another day). Ditto the
ROVER nameplate. To do that would mean building a groin
from scratch but, as a deadline for a model show was
looming, i decided to leave it alone.
Colour scheme meant a bit of a ponder
as he's changed quite a bit with different artists so i
went for the commonist, making sure the eyes were a nice
glowing red. The fun part was creating all the chips,
scratches and dents to his bodywork. And that was him
about done.
If you want to read a more in-depth
piece and how i went about it, there'll be an article at www.dronemagftvmc.com
pretty soon.
MANGAMAX
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