Paul Haug’s God of the Robots

I originally bought this kit with no idea of the story behind it. I just thought it was a great concept and an interesting model.

More than ten years later, I pulled it out of my closet and started to build it. I was intrigued because it was based on a Kelly Freas painting. After some research, it was discovered that this robot originally appeared in a painting called ‘the Gulf Between’ by Kelly Freas. It was the cover for the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine for Tom Godwin’s short story “The Gulf Between”. (The story is a good read, by the way.) Further research revealed that the rock group Queen asked Kelly Freas to create a pastiche of his painting for their album ‘News of the World’ in 1977. That was the inspiration for Mat Fall‘s sculpture used for the model kit called ‘God of the Robots’ by Sideshow Toys in 1997.

After all of my research, I decided I wanted to emulate Kelly’s original painting as much as possible.

The God of the Robots has vinyl, resin and metal parts. The pelvis and the ball joints are resin, the base, feet, legs, arms, head and body are all vinyl and the hands are metal.

• First, the vinyl parts were filled with expandable foam to help them keep their shape over time.
• Next came the clean up of the edges and some preliminary putty work to fill a few bubble holes and surface imperfections.

• Assembly was started with the base. The base, being vinyl, was not entirely round. An old cast aluminum saucepan lid served to add weight and hold the base to a round shape. All of the molded in rivets were cut off, a small hole drilled and replaced with small round headed nails.
• The feet and legs were next. There had to be a lot of forethought in order to achieve as close as possible the position the robot had in the original painting (with a nod to the Queen album). One cannot see the entire robot in the painting, but it made sense that it would be kneeling.
• With all that in mind, the feet, legs and pelvis were assembled in a kneeling position with a gap filling cyano-acylic glue.

• The hands, being metal (and rather heavy for their size), presented an interesting challenge; over time the metal would warp the vinyl arms.

• I took some thick, sturdy rod and bent it to fit the position of the arms leaving ends to fit into the torso and into the metal hands. Then I cut the elbows (which were basically balls) in half. I cut channels for the rod into the elbow halves. Then I glued the parts of the arms, rod and elbow halves together. The hands were drilled and glued onto the wire stubs sticking out of the wrists and the upper arms were glued to the body using the rod going inside the torso as added support.

• Finally, the head was positioned and glued into place.
• Now a little seam putty work and a little clean up and it was ready to paint.

• I used brush and brushing techniques such as washes, dry brushing, small sponge applicators and detailing brushes on this instead of an airbrush to get as close as possible to the feel of Mr. Freas original painting. It was done with acrylics, pastel chalk and weathering powders.

Paul Haug