Welcome to the 25mm Spider Robot Sculpting Page

On the Miniatures Page member "Cacique Caribe" asked if anyone had made miniatures of the little spider robots as seen in the film Minority Report. It seems as if no one had made spider robots in that style so a conversation developed along the lines of how to make something similar. Although not a challange as such I thought i'd have a go at making something.

So I took the request on the miniatures page as is:
1. They seem to be about the size of a human hand or a small round portable CD player.
2. They are very sleek, circular and semi-flat, with very little or nothing in the way of protrusions.
3. What I really, really like is the long, almost flowing, legs that come out of the back of the device.
4. I would probably go for 15 of them and group them in sets of 3 to a round 25mm (or slightly larger) base.


Pic 1

Stage one as you can see in pic 1 was to select the components I would use. So I first created three round blobs of Magic Sculpt putty and when that had cured I cut a piece out of it to created a flat back to stick the legs to. The legs themselves would be simple wire ones. I had some cheap wire I had bought out of a £1 shop it's about 1mm thick.
The idea was to have three robots per base so I picked a round 30mm base and simply added some decoration to it.


Pic 2

Stage two was to make holes to stick the legs in on the body. As you can see from Pic 2 I drilled holes the same width as the wire in the back of the body. This was a bit tricky not to drill through the whole body or into the other holes. This arragement of the legs and the size of the wire was used to decide the size of the body ( about 6mm across). This meant for 28mm figures the robots would be a bit big but I didn't feel I could make them smaller.


Pic 3

Stage three was to bend the robot legs into position. As the description I wanted the legs to be flowing and not bent in lots of places. To get a nice rounded bend I used the handle of a paint brush as you can see in pic 3.


Pic 4

Pic 4 shows the three robots with legs attached. As I was bending the legs I was visualising how all three would fit on the base. So I made two of them with the legs closer together rather than run out of space on the base. Also I didn't want all of the legs to be touching the ground to give the miniatures a more animated feel.


Pic 5

And so here we have the first look at the robots on the base. I drilled some holes in the base to stick some of the legs in to give the miniature more strength. At this point I also hadn't decided on eyes for the robots. I didn'r want to sculpt a raised eye effect and so thought at this point I would paint the eyes on.


Pic 6

To show the scale of the miniature I have placed them next to a 25mm miniature from GZG for larger heroic 28mm to 30mm the robots would be closer to the size I was aiming for.


Pic 7

And so we come to the final article.As you can see I finally decided to cut a small slit into the front of each robot for the eyes. I also painted the floor as if it was rusty metal plates to give a contrast to the shiny spider robots.
I do think these robots were easy to make and hope people will be able to follow what I have done to make some of their own.

Jeremey (AKA Germ)