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