23: SS-74 Bumblebee (Revenge of The Fallen)
UPDATE: For this gallery update, I refined the paint work for the eyes peeking through the helmet, and added the silver trim around the tail lights like I did for DOTM Bumblebee!
It's been a little while since my last custom upload, it's good to be back in the swing of things! ROTF Bee ran into a couple issues during the process, but it all turned out well. Enjoy!
- Robot Mode -
Considering SS-74 is a retool of SS-49, which I've already painted, I had a pretty good idea going into this custom what I wanted to do. Gunmetal was the base, of course, and I used silver, copper, gold, and a darker gunmetal for detailing.
The first difference from SS-49 comes from the shade of yellow. Pretty much every movie Bumblebee I've painted is within the range that works with Testor's flat yellow. SS-74, however, has a new more orange-ish shade of yellow that's much more screen accurate. I was beginning to worry about finding the right shade of yellow paint when I realized I could mix some of my gloss tangerine with the yellow to get the right color. It worked!
The paint work, even besides the shades of yellow, isn't identical to SS-49. I looked through more movie footage and tried to go for even more detail with this one, putting more silver and darker gunmetal details on the arms and legs. I also had to paint the pinstripes for the stripes on the chest, which was somewhat challenging but I got the hang of it. One very small detail I'm really happy with is the 4 copper-colored dots on each corner of the silver bits on Bee's head. They're super small and hard to see, but I noticed them when looking through footage and had to add them!
I also decided to change things up on the plasma cannon. I detailed it slightly differently, and added some copper detailing that I think really helps it stand out. Bee's plasma cannon in the movies glows orange when fired, but my SS-49 already had a cannon with the orange glow painted inside. Looking back through footage I found that the cannon barrel often flashes blue on the inside right before it fires, and it also glows blue in DOTM when he points it at Sam's boss. To help differentiate SS-74 from SS-49, I painted the inside of the barrel blue.
One last small note, I did take a small creative liberty with paint: The Chevy bowtie on Bee's grill is red/black in vehicle mode but gold in robot mode in the movie. It's technically not an error since Bee does still have a gold bowtie on the back of vehicle mode, but I wanted to have the black and red one in robot mode as well.
- Vehicle Mode -
SS-74 (at least the Buzzworthy release) has a very unfortunate lack of paint in the front of vehicle mode - large portions of the grill are left unpainted. This was my first aim as I started to paint the figure, and getting getting the central portion of the grill symmetrical took a few tries. Besides that, it was just small details work: the headlights and foglights are painted silver, there's red and orange for the reflective pieces on the sides, gunmetal for the back and silver for the exhaust pipes and license plates.
There are a few things I did with this that I didn't to with SS-49: I continued the stripes on the back ever so slightly, and I painted the vents on the sides in black. I was hoping to do this with panel liner, but the vents are so shallow that model wash doesn't work very well there. Using my new super-thin brush, I was able to get each of the vents.
Paint used:
Testor's Enamels:
- Flat yellow + gloss tangerine for main yellow
- Metallic silver, gold, copper
- Gloss black
- Flat gunmetal
- Gloss red
- Gloss tangerine
Decoart Acrylics:
- Gunmetal
- Extreme sheen Sapphire
Other:
- Craftsmart blue paint pen
- Craftsmart black paint pen
- Testor's spray gloss coat