Scratchbuilding: Scrapper Bot

As I alluded to in my Samurai Bead Bot post, I more or less built this second bead bot concurrently using bits of whatever was left over. Crappy image quality alert as these were also taken with my old camera phone sometime in April.

It will become apparent later on that I decided to change up a few things (as well as add his hands and feet) but here’s the picture I took during the initial scratch build. As usual, super glue, baking soda, beads, and bits were the order of the day. And if you’re curious, that’s 1mm armature wire I’m using. At first I was a bit worried it would be too thin, but it’s actually perfect for miniature builds like these.

After adding his hands, feet (the same apoxie sculpt copies of a Robotech figure’s feet that I used for the Samurai bead bot), and a bisected wooden bead for his head/face, I mounted him on an old GI Joe stand (I have quite a few of these) and blasted him with a coat of flat gray primer. And no, I don’t know why his crotch armor in this pic looks like it was set on fire and put out with an axe. Trick of the light, I guess.

I used Scrapper Bot here as a guinea pig to test out different homemade washes and brown mixes (turns out I didn’t actually have any brown paints at the time. Oops). Suffice to say, none of them really worked out that great but it was kind of fun to try….hence why he looks like a murky, muddy, mess. To put a cherry on top of this disappointment sundae, I decided to take an acrylic paint pen and draw on skull to make it look like edgy teenagers broke into the scrapyard and graffiti’d him a face. Spoiler alert: I can’t draw. I thought about going back and dry-brushing on some metallic paints but decided it wasn't worth the paint. So I slapped a clear coat on him and called it a day.

And so ends my initial bead bots project. I have plans for another set (and a lifetime supply of beads) as well as a slightly different approach than this first wave, which I’ll circle back to eventually. But since this build back in April, I’ve been learning how to paint miniatures and actually acquired some proper miniature paints along the way, so expect to see more of that in the very near future.