I FINALLY finished up my latest, Unicron! It took longer than planned, but he ended up being a labor of love, and features a new flashing, light-up planet maw. Recipe follows the pics!
It was actually a bit of a chore to conceive the actual vision I had. I wanted to make a version as true to the 86 movie as I could, which meant one thing: simplicity. It was really tempting to paint little gray panels, or do some improvised details, but I had to stay on task and keep it simple! I started out to make him as ancient, beat up and worn as I could, but after test pics I found I didn't like covering up that rich orange, so I went with minimal forced highlights. My goal was to paint it in a fashion where the natural colors brought out the details and hope that the pics captured it. Washes and drybrushing were used, but sparingly.
He was painted using various enamels including Orange Mist and Radiant Silver. I didn't want the washes to look like black lines drawn all over him, so I used dark washing on the orange parts with Games Workshop Dark Flesh. It's semi translucent and a brownish orange color. The wash for the silver and dark gray parts was TMMA Gunmetal. Aircraft gray and Silver was used for drybrushing, as well as international orange. The eyes were silver, then clear green.
The planet maw was created using a flashing Jager light. (I work in a bar) The "jaws" are actually one half of Barricade's weapon from the untransformable version. ( I can't recall what those were called...) I sparingly used a few clear jewels for the planet ring to simulate the light up nodes in the movie, while using aircraft gray for the rest of the ring details. I have no IDEA where his mini con went, so I patched the hole with a chestpiece from a Zoids Owl. The new planet spikes were actually wooden grill skewers coated with Future, and I drilled holes for their new home. The 2 halves for the planet mode have been bonded together using epoxy so I could make the new light-up maw, but he looks terrible with the planet halves hanging on his back anyway, and I don't know ANYone who displays him like that.
The light-up maw has an on/off button, and blinks on and off at about a 2 second interval. The light has this cool honeycomb effect which is subtle but cool.
Any comments, critiques, criticism and ideas are encouraged! Thanks for your time!
He up on ebay here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... :MESELX:IT
excellent! 
