Scratchbuilding: Samurai Bead Bot

 Back in March, I came across an excellent youtube channel called Bill Making Stuff (another inspiration for this blog and a treasure trove of great crafting tips) and was so taken by his videos on making robot miniatures out of beads and bits of plastic that I decided to make some of my own. So I gathered up some beads (enough to make an entire army of bots) and some armature wire and I was ready to hit the ground running.

The bead bot I really had my heart set on making was a samurai robot (once again, heavily inspired by the one Bill made).

Since I put this together sometime in April (it’s June 28^th as of this writing), I’m a bit hazy on exactly what bits of material I used. For the main structure, I used beads (duh), armature wire, bits of hookup wire, plasticard (for the sword and armor plates), and pieces of chopped-up hollow plastic q-tip shafts.

For Samurai-bot’s wakidate (that’s the little crescent moon thing you sometimes see on samurai armor, fyi), I cut a pizza saver in half and snipped off its legs. The armor on his shoulders and hips (sode and kasazuri?) I had an ammo bandolier from some old generic commando/army guy action figure that had the texture I was looking for and cut that up. I think his face was from a spray bottle that I dissected and the thing on his head may or may not have come from one of those little pullback motors that are in those tiny toy cars. The base came from a bootleg Revoltech Danboard figure that I got off of Aliexpress (or possibly ebay) several years ago.

I didn’t take a picture of it, but I also added feet after realizing I couldn’t really build around where I already glued him to the base (one of the many goofs I made in this project). His feet I made from an old Robotech capsule figure that I made copies of using Blue Stuff as a mold and cast using two-part Apoxie sculpt. I made several copies of what would become my generic robot feet. I’ll probably make a separate post on that whole process because it’s a pretty fun one. I also decided to “chew up” bits of his sword and armor with needle files (a set of six was $6 on Amazon) because I wanted to go for a rough, scrappy look.

After everything was all superglued together (using baking powder as a poor man’s accelerant and hardener), I primed the model in a Rust-Oleum Flat Gray Primer. I use that stuff as my go-to primer.

So after letting him sit for a while, I decided to finally bite the bullet and try painting him, having never actually tried painting a miniature prior to this. At the time, the only paints I had at my disposal were some acrylic craft paints I picked up here and there and a set of cheapo Testors model paints (which I can’t really recommend for this kind of thing, even if you are on a shoestring budget though your mileage may vary).

I knew I wanted to stick with the grungy, dirty look so I mixed up a home-made black wash using some black acrylic dollar store paint (mixed with a little brown), some water, and some rinse aid. Without any real clue what I was doing and a basic idea of the color scheme I was going for, I slapped on a base coat of black, orange, and gold. Then I attempted to dry brush on some silver and gold (leaving way too much paint on the brush, rookie mistake) and then slathered on my poor man’s black wash and wiped off as much as I could with a paper towel.

This is what I ultimately ended up with:

I took the front view picture back in April with my crusty old phone and the rear view just now with my new phone (in case you couldn’t tell).

After it dried, I decided to spray him with a Krylon clear coat and call it a day. This build was a lot of fun and for a beginner’s effort, I was pleasantly surprised by how it turned out. Much more so than I was with his bead bot buddy that I built alongside him using excess bits and bobs from this build. But that’s a story for another day.