Shooting Colour (upper body armour & arms)

Shooting the colour. We'll come back to the legs as they really are and were a complete pain and much more involved than any of the other jobs have been thus far. So for now we will move onto shooting all the upper body pieces and the arms with colour. For this I had to actually decide and MAKE the paints myself. This was quite a challenge as I am going for a part 1 Robocop colour scheme and although most people kinda look at him and assume he is merely a metal / silver colour, there really are A LOT of tones in there. In many ways, when light hits the clear laquer on Robo, he almost appears to have a Flip, or pearlesence in his colour. After many watches of the BluRay and some help from images of a surviving suit I settled on a Metalic Blue, a Metalic Green and a Metalic Purple. These would be my ROBOCOLOURS. I did infact also mix a Metalic Gold but it turned out that I wouldn't need it, but we'll come back to that later.


The Hand mixed ROBOCOLOURS

 The issue with mixing the paints was to find the tone colour that would work well for the robotones and not "swamp" the base silver on the armour, but that would also look accurate to the tonality in the film. For this I had to take into account a good many things. First of all I had to consider the age of the film and the film stock used at the time in the 80's. These were all gamma corrected and colour balanced in post production to attain a desired look the director wanted. This of course would change the real life look on the colours in robo. There is also aggressive lighting in Robocop to produce the shines on him to make him look more like solid metal in the film. This would have inevitably bleach much of the tones away as well.  So, once I had settled and chosen my base tones I then needed to metalasize the paint. For this I added a base metalic silver to the colour. This made the colour a little more translucent and also gave a common partner between the colours and the base silver, allowing for a much better blend when airbrushing.


ROBOBLUE with silver added for blending.

 Now this is where the real headache (brown trouser moments) started, because if I screwed up the airbrushing of the tones I would have to rub down and start cleaning and priming the pieces all over again. So I was sweating like mad with terror and stressed to my highest point during this stage and I shall point out that I still have more to go so please spare me a thought for my pain hahahah. I started on the forearms with the ROBOBLUE having as much reference material around as possible in the hope of matching where these colours are laid down, as they are not simply all over it  but rather in very specific places. You can rationalise a lot of the colours in the armour if you have ever heated metals or machined metal or die pressed metal. As metal heats and cools many will give off rainbow colour patterns, or blocks of colour (purple say) in the worked area, a self patina if you will. You can see this approach has been taken with the original Robocop paint scheme as whereever his heat vents are on the suit you will notice a high percentage of purples in that area showing where the metal is heating and cooling. With all this on board, I nervously began shooting colour.


Right forearm piece shot with ROBOBLUE under artificial light.



Right forearm piece shot with ROBOBLUE in natural light.

 Once I started to relax a little and the panic subsided enough where I didn't think I was going to ruin the paint job and promply drown myself in a vat of polyester resin I move on to the upper arms with the ROBOBLUE also, again working slowly from as much reference material as possible.



Upper arms shot with ROBOBLUE under artificial light.

 Once this had all dried (rather quickly in fact as these were my own colours and i was using my IWATA airbrush) i moved swiftly, and rather excitedly onto the ROBOPURPLE and finally ROBOGREEN. HOWEVER something I cannot stress enough here is this kind of colour lay up onto a car body colour like the Vauxhal Metalic Silver No#31 when dry is very, very delicate. It  will scratch off in the blink of an eye. It will scar like you cannot imagine, and in some worst cases, can rub off with touching if aggressive with your handling. It will remain this way until shot with clear acrylic laquer. If you ever do this method please HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE AT ALL TIMES. As you will see I have mine resting on bath towels to help protect them from scratching on the floor.


Both forearms now shot with ROBOPURPLE & ROBOGREEN.



Right arm upper shot with ROBOPURPLE & ROBOGREEN.



Left arm upper shot with ROBOPURPLE & ROBOGREEN.

 With all four of these pieces now shot with colour I was ready for the clear acrylic laquer. I cannot stress how glad I was to start getting the laquer on as I was really pantsing it with fear that I would mar or scratch all the work I had already done. Now I will quickly get back to something I mentioned earlier. The ROBOGOLD. When you watch the film and look at reference materials there is definitely a gold hint here and there but what I found was, when the puple and green are shot on, as that blends in with the other colours and the base coat, natural gold tones just appear anyway. It's like it gains a flip in it's colour all of it's own. Happy accident I know, but hey, who knows, maybe that's how Rob Bottin and his crew attainted their gold eh?


Right forearm shot with 3 coats of clear acrylic laquer.



Right upper arm shot with 3 coats of clear acrylic laquer.

 Once I had laquered all of the arm pieces I left them to sit off for about 3 days to fully harden and then shot the bottom-most part of the forearms with Simoniz gloss black. That was effectively the arms finished. I did paint one more thing, the insides matt acrylic black (by hand) so that the insides would just look nicer, and a lot tidier. So, from here I was about to feel my first achivement high by putting the arms back together and seeing the first FINISHED pieces of my Robocop Refit Refurbishment project.


Right arm FINISHED.



Both arms, with gloves.

 Stay tuned, the next installment will be the back and chest!! Thanks for reading. Hope you're enjoying my project so far.