Round Six Report from Rob Jedi

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Rob Jedi writes:

Hey, folks - welcome to the Final Round of the Last Painter Standing. I'd like to thank once again:

• Bill, for organising this
• i-Kore, for sponsoring the event
• The Miniatures Page viewers that voted for someone else
• and finally, my many worthy fellow-competitors, a grand group of painters that I'd like to meet in person someday

Now, on to the show

For the final round, we were given a rather unusual robot from the VASA range. To say I was inspired by this thing would be a lie, alas.

I started off by doing my usual research around the web for any pics of this puppy. I found a total of 2 pics, one on the i-Kore site (which was missing the guns), and another on the Archangel Games site (which at least had all the parts on it).

Even with a visual guide how to assemble him, I really didn't know what to do with him - he's very much like a robot version of that 4-armed monster from Mortal Kombat, so - apart from painting him like that - I was stumped.

I just couldn't decide what to do with a 4-armed robot. My painting mates advised leaving off the extra pair - it might work better. I just wasn't sure. (Of course, you all may have noticed this round has gone extra-long since Garness was stuck on an oil rig somewhere in the ocean, so I had plenty of time to try and think of what to do with him.)

Inspiration eventually came when I started digging through my pile of Hobby Japan's and various Gundam pics I'd run across on the web. I decided to follow the fluff a bit, with the mention that VASA are like the U.N. or police of the VOID setting, and do the robot up as a police unit - with a lot of Patlabor and Appleseed inspiration thrown in, along with a rough-and-scuffed look inspired by this rather cool-looking Gundam pic:

On To Preparation

The robot took a good week or more of nights cleaning up all the parts. The metal is very hard and required a fair amount of effort to file clean. On top of that, it has the rather unfortunate placement of the mould line right through the middle of the windscreen on the front of the cockpit.

It was also necessary to Dremel the sockets, for the arms to get a smooth socket that would fit the shoulders. I also did this for the join to the groinpiece.

I started construction by drilling the holes in the supplied plastic base, and putting the feet in with their pegs. Using this as a kind of jig, I glued the legs to the hips and glued that to the body. After that, I test-fit everything to work out the pose.

I noticed that some detail could be used on the neck, since the head is connected at the very back. So I used some plastic rod and glued it in a V-shape onto the neck for actuators. (I see this kind of detail all the time on Gundam kits - it really adds a nice bit of extra realism to joints.) I then trimmed these back after the glue had dried, so the head could sit properly.

I then sorted the arms out and glued them into position, followed by the shoulder armour and head. I had decided from the start that I didn't want to use the banner, so I had a look for something else to detail the back with. What I dug up was an old box of air-rifle pellets. These had a nice kind of engine-cylinder-sort-of look, so I tried them out by blue-tacking them on in various positions on the back. I eventually put 5 of them on there. It gave the (rather plain) back a much more cluttered look that seemed way more appropriate for a mech.

OK - next step was to remove the pegs from his feet with a jewellers saw, and replace them with long lengths of brass rod. I already knew I wanted to do a small diorama-style base, and figured having pins to just stick in would be easier...also, after the experience with the rider from the last LPS round, I knew to do the drilling before the paint was applied.

Now as I just mentioned, I planned to do a diorama base...so I needed a couple of extras to put in with the robot. I was going to go buy some more VASA guys, when I remembered I'd picked up a pair of riot-shield-armed VASA dudes in some sale last year. After much digging through my stockpile of lead, I found them. I also had a commander dude to go with them, but he didn't have a shield so I left him out. These two - bunched in with the mech's grape guns covering them - really set the look I wanted. So I cleaned them up, glued them together, and put them aside.