ROBOCOP

At this time I have only screen-captured images to show for the hundreds of hours of work I put into Robocop back in the long, hot summer of 1986. Rob Bottin did not allow me to take home any copies of my illustrations, and he never really did offer me a good explanation for this. I think the words 'paranoid and megalomaniac' come to mind

I created hundreds of drawings, and dozens of very detailed renderings during the design process of this elaborate costume. Some of the best in my career as a pencil artist.

Every detail was worked out on paper before it was executed in clay. Every aspect of the suit was drawn in rotational views for the sculptors to follow. Rob put an enormous premium on design, and he liked to nail down things explicitly in drawings before they were executed in another medium.

We explored many directions for this character before coming around to our initial idea: make a sleek, powerful, and heroic robot cop with stylized anatomy, and just the right amount of mechanical shapes. We looked a lot at Sorayama's Sexy Robot books to try and find a way to make the rather short and un-heroicly shaped Peter Weller into a believable super-cop.

I tried to sell Bottin on the idea of designing a molded OCP Police badge right into his breastplate, but he didn't go for it.

This suit looked like a million bucks in the second film, once they had a chance work out some of the bugs and to make it out of a different material that could take a more perfect finish. These images are from the first, and only good Robocop film.