Hammertime!

Hi all

firstly, my apologies for you now having the MC Hammer song in your head for the rest of the day....

Recently I was very fortunate to win one of Bryan "Vampifan" Scott's fabulous prize giveaways.  If you can't remember what the prize was, the link is here.  Among all that 2000AD goodness was this awesome dude.



Sergeant Hammerstein of the ABC Warriors, I lifted this straight off of Wikipedia to save myself writing a ton of stuff....

Hammerstein is described as a Mark III war droid and was commissioned in the early 21st Century to fight in the Volgan Wars. Hammerstein's right hand is a hammer that is used in hand-to-hand combat while on the back of his left he has a missile launcher. There are tank tracks on his feet to aid mobility. Hammerstein also has two sockets in his waist to attach auxiliary arms but he finds these embarrassing. During combat operations his head has a grim human like face but after he was decommissioned this was replaced with 'civilian' head that features a single square 'eye'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammerstein_(comics)

The ABC Warriors are/were in my top ten best thing about 2000ADs universe.  I loved the characters especially the sarge and his human consort Terri - who believed she was a robot! They were also involved in the plot lines of one of my favourite comic characters of all time - Nemesis the Warlock. Fab times!

So imagine my delight then when this 55mm monster blasted his way into da Grotto and demanded to be painted first!

Sgt Hammerstein unbased at the back, you can see the size of him compared to the 28mm figs.

First of all though he needed to be based, originally he comes as a single piece with a integral metal base, but considering the size of him this was woefully inadequate and he couldn't stand up unaided.  So rooting around in my bits box revealed a lovely 60mm round mdf base that I'd bought for my Bolt Action medium machine gun crews.  As it is a really big base I didn't want it to be too plain, so I found some scraps of foamcard that I had used in previous projects and with the judicious application of sand and cat litter produced this...

Knowing that the primer spray I use would melt some of the foam, i covered parts of it in PVA leaving some areas exposed to produce a ruined masonary look that is fairly generic looking.  I then covered the grey primered base in a home made black ink and drybrushed it with Vallejo "Medium Sea Gray" and then again with a drop of white added to the gray.  I then painted Sgt. Hammerstein in a mix of GW's "Runefang Steel" and "Mournfang Brown with a drop of GW "Averland Sunset" to create the golden brown colour.  Then picking out the joints and feet/tracks in black and drybrushing with runefang steel.

base colours and drybrushed joint/feet

after that I used Army Painter's "Strong Tone" and washed the whole model in a really heavy coat. Once that was dry I highlighted with the base mix and then gradually lightened it up with successive tones by adding more "runefang steel".  I picked out the ABC markings in pure white and finsihed the base off with some yellow sector markings and one of Bryan's wanted posters that he'd sent me months ago as another gift!

no gold paint was used in the painting of this model

he's massive!

does my butt look big in this?

are you sure?

As for use for the Sarge, I've got loads fizzing about in my head! from generic robot for almost every futuristic setting to the boss level beastie in a Judge Dredd RPG encounter to finding more of his ABC buddies and running them as a skirmish faction for the JD miniatures game!

What ever I use him for you know that he's gonna be a big hit.......groan, I'll get my coat....

hope you enjoy
dGG