by Larry Johnson

Ever since watching that little robot football player animation on FOX Football Sundays, I've wanted to build a little robot football player and the Academy Terran Marine would be the best kit to work from. The Yellow Contest coincided with my decision to model my favorite team, the Steelers, so I pushed the project to the front burner.

The kit is basically OOB except for two modifications. I felt the 1/30th scale of the kit was too small to display an effective Steeler logo on the helmet so I increased the scale to 1/24th and replaced the head with a 1/24th Airfix Harrier pilot head, sanding the helmet smooth and building a face mask from tube styrene. The other modification was to reverse the positions of the shoulder pauldrons to make masking the yellow and white stripes easier. Mounting the parts regularly made for a nasty compound curve.

The model is painted in Model Master Acryls, Aircraft Interior black and Chrome Yellow. The Steeler logo decal was made from an image from the internet printed on Testors decal paper at Kinko's (guy only charged me 9 cents as I had my own paper and it used so very little ink). I coated it with Microscale decal coating stuff and it turned out rather nice. I washed the figure with oils and weathered it with pastel washes and heavy paint chipping with black/silver and brown/black Tamiya acrylics mixes. The number 58 (Go Jack Lambert!) is model railroad dry transfers.

Image: Rear view

Image: Helmet logo and shoulder chipping

Image: Heavy weathering

Image: Overall view