First off, a bit of sad news.

As some of you may already know, our caster-in-chief (fearless leader, or whatever you want to call YR, the main man), has had a death in the family.  My condolences go out to him and his loved ones.  

As a result, the store re-launch will experience a small delay of one week.   We apologize for any inconvenience, and trust that the community will understand the desire to put family as our first priority.

That said, there are a lot of new and exciting things I'll be sharing with you over the next few days, so be sure to tune in to the blog so you don't miss any of the fun!

Tonight, we present the community with a choice.  We're putting the finishing touches on the 3rd piece in the Modular Head System, and the design team has come to an impasse as to which expression to give to one of the faces.   So we want the group to decide.

Keep in mind that the face will be able to be used with any helmet (The one pictured, the one we revealed earlier, the #2 design, which has not yet been shown, or any of the future designs we'll offer), so concentrate on the face itself, and think about which you think you'd find the most useful in a variety of applications.

  Click here to register your vote!

I got a big box of fun tonight, and was inspired to use one of my purchases in a little design-theory comparison.

I present the evolution of Rumble (There’s three color schemes there, I could be referring to any one of them, so no hate mail!):

Rumble (And his brother Frenzy, also pictured) were major Decepticon characters in the early days of G1 (namely the first year when the entire Decepticon cast shared 7 molds among 11 characters).   Presented as twin trouble makers, they were based on one of the Microchange mini-cassette molds.  While the original toy (on the far left) only featured a pair of rifles, the cartoon (and later the comic) portrayed him as being able to transform his arms into ground-pounding pile-drivers.

 The Japanese PVC figure (2^nd from the right) was designed to represent the animation model of Rumble (In the cartoon, Rumble is the blue one).  As you can see many of the toy’s distinctive elements are well represented:  the circuit-design on the chest, the helmet shape, the back-mounted guns, and even the toy’s leg-stickers are nicely represented, if somewhat simplified.

The Robot Heores PVC figure (2nd from the left) also takes the same cues, though changes the proportioning to achieve the cute “chibi” style of the Robot Heroes.   You can also see clearly here how the eye shape is a much more square versus the original toys, also the eye color was changed to red for the animation (as was the case for almost all the Decepticon characters). 

Comparing the two PVC figures notice that the first uses silver in three places: guns, face, pile drivers.   The Robot Heroes figure also uses silver in three places: guns, face, and feet (As inspired by the toy.  Ignoring toy or cartoon accuracy for the moment, I think the Robot Heroes’ version achieves a better visual balance with the silver accents.   The top-and-bottom balance arrangement provides a path of progression for your eye (the silver as the brightest & lightest color in the naturally catches your attention.  The eye flows from the face (The guns are a little lost, but that’s OK, as they are the same color and on the same level as the face), to the bright contrast of the yellow-on-black of the chest (which is very eye catching, but also a little visually “irritating”), and then back to the cool bright silver of the feet, grounding the figure.    The color layout does a great job of ensuring that the viewer takes the whole figure in every time you glance at it.

Finally on the far-left we have the non-Hasbro-issue Shadow Warrior figure.  You can tell at a glance that this toy was inspired by Rumble.   The guns, the head-design, the circuit-detailing on the chest and the pile-drivers all clearly evoke the character.   Compared side-by-side with the original toy and the animation-model inspired PVC’s, however, you can clearly see how DIFFERENT the Shadow Warrior is in terms of proportion and detailing (not to mention color).  Yet, despite these major differences, the designers have captured enough of the key-details that one immediately recognizes the character.

One (or maybe two) character, four very different interpretations, and yet they’re all married by certain key elements.

Do you have a favorite character-design evolution you’d like to suggest for the blog?  Let us know about it in the comments below!

When casting about my apartment trying to decide what workshop tip to share tonight, I was initially stumped.   I found another GREAT storage solution that also doubles as a great photo-backdrop (I used it in the dye-job article, actually), I picked up a cool brush-caddy, but I feel like I’ve talked the storage and organization thing to death, at least for now.

But then I hit on my OTHER recent purchase, and I realized, it’s worth talking about the most basic and essential workshop tool of all:

Good lighting.

If you don’t light your environment well you will not be able to sculpt, cut, sand, shape, or most especially of all, paint with any accuracy.   Ours is primarily a visual art, and you need to be able to see what you’re working on to create the visual effect you want to achieve.

So in the picture above you can see that I have a few key elements.  I have my workbench positioned near large windows.   Natural lighting is the BEST; unfortunately I don’t get to work during daylight hours very often, but I want to be able to get as much natural light on those days when I do get a chance.

I also have a large floor lamp with adjustable head.  I have this one fitted with a natural-light light bulb, which comes close to replicating the natural spectrum, which is important, as you want to make sure your paint work will look consistent in as many lighting conditions as possible.   Natural light is the best baseline to work against.

Lastly I have a small desk-lamp, also adjustable.   This puppy only cost me $3 or so, I bought three when I picked it up.   It’s small enough that I can add one or more to any work (or photography) station to eliminate shadows.

You can pretty much never have too much lighting.   And as I mentioned, desk lamps can be had VERY cheaply these days, less than a small base-figure, so make sure you go out and equip your work station right!

Got any lighting tips?   Workbench essentials?  Let us know in the comment section below!

When I was a kid one of my earliest “mods” was to add Transformer faction symbols to non-Transformer robot toys.   Well meaning relatives bought the occasional Shogun Warrior or Go-Bot, and while I usually thought the toy was cool, I wasn’t happy unless they were sporting a faction-emblem.  (In retrospect, I wish I had been creative enough as a kid to find value in “neutrals,” but I digress).

In that era before Reprolabels, or the ability to print water-slide decals at home on your inkjet printer, my solution was a simple, if inelegant, one.  I would cut the symbols out of the catalogs that were packed in with the toys and use invisible tape to affix the emblems.  It was ugly, and decidedly non-permanent, but my child-self was onto something.  

In our world of print-media (and on-demand color printing) there’s an almost infinite supply of logos, symbols, and other decorations that you could cut out and attach to your toys for decoration.  Scotch-tape is a lousy way to affix these cut-outs, but if there was a better solution, it might be a lot quicker, easier, and cheaper than creating your own waterslides, and it might work better than most of the “sticker paper” that is readily available for the home-printer.

You guessed it, there IS a solution.  It’s called “decoupage.”  That’s French for “to cut up.”   It’s mostly used by crafty-moms to decorate switch-plates and the like, but as I mentioned in a previous article, there’s a lot of good robot building stuff in the craft aisle! 

I’m only going to cover the most basic technique here, but if you want to do more research there’s a million articles on the subject online, and you can accomplish all kinds of really compelling effects, including applying your “cut outs” to textured surfaces (like the sculpted body of a toy, for instance), and building up the finish so that the applied cut out feels seamless as compared to the surface it’s been applied to.   Great stuff, and cheap and easy in the bargain!  Let’s have a look-

I started with some basic materials:

A robot to receive a new emblem

A catalog to cut something out of

A pair of scissors to cut with

An old paint brush

A pointed tool

A bit of sandpaper (I like Testor’s flexible model-grade stuff)

“Mod Podge”

Mod Podge is water-soluble adhesive/finish specially formulated for this kind of work.  You can use regular white glue for a lot of decoupage applications but since we’re doing toys instead of scrap-books, I suggest spending the extra couple of bucks (I think that bottle cost me like $6), to get the real stuff.

So our first step is to simply cut out the image we want to pate onto our figure.  I cut out this minicon emblem.   Why?   Because I needed an example, and I wanted to pick something that I DIDN’T have a million actual decals of.

Next I sand the place I want to apply the cut-out.  The idea here is to rough up the surface just a little to give the adhesive something to stick to.

With the surface roughed up, I’ll now use my brush to spread a little of the Mod Podge on the toy:

With the adhesive spread around, the next step is to apply the cut out to the toy, this is where the pointed-tool comes in handy (You want to keep your fingers out of the equation as much as possible, fingerprints are never our friend!)

I also used a moistened brush to thin out the Mod Podge and spread it around a little more evenly.   It’s perfectly fine to cover over the top of the cut-out or to spread the adhesive around the area, it will dry completely clear.

It dries after just a few minutes, and now it’s just a matter of building up layers.  With a little time and a bit of patience you can build up the area around the cut-out to create a totally smooth surface, with the cut out essentially laminated into your figure.

After the first few layers, I suggest working around the cut out and not going over the top of the paper-piece any more.  Once it’s well adhered, you want to concentrate on building up the surrounding area so as to create a smooth surface.

So SteamHammer is now proud to be a mincon!   To do a good job I’d need to add a lot more layers, and I should have taken more care to apply thin coats and avoid air-bubbles, but even this quicky slap-dash effort has yielded a good looking result, and when I rub my finger across it, it actually feels more like the slight-raised area of a tampograph than like a sticker, with some more layers to blend it, even that subtle difference in surface texture could be worked away.

A couple of quick notes about inkjet prints.   Because the Mod Podge (or most other products that you can use this technique with) is water based, it can and will cause inkjet print-outs to bleed.   There are a few easy fixes for this.   You can use a spray fixative like the kind used for inkjet-waterslide decals (But that kind of defeats the cost-savings).  You can spray your print out with hairspray (reportedly the cheaper the better).  Or finally you could make a color-photocopy of your inkjet-print.

And there you have it.   We’re blessed in this age of Internet commerce that there is a LOT of support for our art-form, so this is probably not an every-day technique.   However, I know every once in a while I want to add a particular something to a custom, and there’s not always a ready-made decal or water-slide available.  If that special-something happens to appear in a magazine, book, or even as an image on a webpage, this CAN be the road of least resistance to go from 2D graphic to 3D deco.

Next week, silk-flower-arrangements as Beast Machines era energon-weapons.

I’m kidding.

Do you have a crazy quilting-circle technique to make your super robots extra cool?   Let us know about it in the comments below!

Ahh the 1980’s, this innocent decade (OK, not really, in SO many ways) was a time when toy-manufacturers thought nothing of marketing hyper-realistic handgun toys to small children.  No orange barrel-plugs either.  Kids had been playing with cap-gun six-shooters since the cowboy-craze of the 60’s, and so it continued until the decade of Giant Sentient Mecha.

I won’t go into the whole tragic-accident-uproar that caused the toy-laws to change, but suffice to say toy guns aren’t permitted to look like actual guns any longer.   I’m not even a parent, but in retrospect, the idea of 6 year olds going “Bang bang!” while holding perfect child-sized replicas of Walther P38s does feel kind of creepy.  I was one of those kids.   I remember drawing a bead through the scope on my sister.   I’m glad the laws are different now.

If you haven’t guessed yet, we’re talking about Gun Robo!  I’m going to tackle Microman’s place in Transformer history one subline at a time, because there’s a lot to cover.  Gun Robo is a particularly interesting place to start because-

A: It’s kind of a crazy toyline (as my intro suggests)

B: 2/3’s of it got made into Transformers.

C: The odd-bot out is pretty cool.

Let’s talk about the big daddy first, the MC12 Walther P38/MC13 Walther P38 Special (UNCLE).   Otherwise known as Megatron.

(Picture credit to the Pre-Transformers Page, a great primer on the TF toy line origins!)

The mold that would become Megatron came in three flavors, the Stock-And-Silencer-Red-And-Silver MC13 edition that would be Megatron’s standard, as well as a Black-Blue-And-Brown version and a Matte-Gray-Black-and-Blue edition.  The last version would eventually be retconned into TF-canon as the G1 version of Megaplex:

(Thanks to Microforever for the picture, I can’t recommend this site enough; you could spend a lifetime reading about Microman here!)

In addition to the color variations, the original Microchange versions of this mold also included a mechanism to fire small plastic bullets, a feature that was restored for the Japanese Transformers reissue of the toy.  

Slightly lesser known, is the MC-07 1910 Browning.

Browning would enter into the Transformers Universe virtually unchanged, and even named simply “Browning” in the Masterforce era.

Notably, the Masterforce cartoon portrayed Browning in a manner similar to the original Gun Robo concept.  Rather than having him be a giant robot that magically shrunk into a small gun (like Megatron), Browning was instead a TINY robot that was friend, companion, and guardian to a young child, Cancer.

Compare this clip from Masterforce to the original Microman commercial for Browning, Takara was clearly returning to their original marketing strategy:

Kinda creepy in both cases, but at least by the Masterforce era, Takara had decided to make Browning a cute, comic-relief handgun.   Though, we later find out that he is actually incredibly powerful.  Yeah, kids, playing with realistic guns…  Anyway.

Finally we get to MC-11 S&W Magnum 44, who is reportedly the largest of the group, and whose barrel actually revolves while firing:

(Picture credit to the Pre-Transformers Page)

Of the three, over the years I’ve actually come to like this design the most (Though it’s the only one I don’t own, ironically).  I love his big chunky fists, the head design looks really nice too.  My only quibble is that he seems kind of  “Old West,” which is probably why Hasbro did not select it for Megatron.   It’s interesting to contemplate, however, that this MIGHT have been Megatron had Hasbro chosen to license a different mold. The Walther mold is flawed in a lot of ways, so it’s almost surprising that they went with that one, again, I would guess it was because the Walther looks more “modern.”  Browning is very small, so probably wouldn’t have fit the price-point that Hasbro was trying to fill.

However, the Magnum mold may have been released as a “Trasformer” by the Italian company GiG.  Before Transformers was born, GiG had held the license for the distribution of Microchange and Diaclone toys in Italy.  When the Transformer craze hit they still had that license and started branding their toys as “Trasformers” to cash in on the hype.  Eventually Hasbro brought them into the fold, but some accounts say that the Magnum may have been slipped into the not-quite-unofficial Trasformer line-up before the crack down.

That’s all I have to say about Gun Robo.   It’s crazy, but it’s really fun.  We’ll talk about more Microchange stuff later, many Transformers were born here.   I just wish Scope Man had made it into the Transformers Universe…then again, maybe he eventually did.

Do you have a favorite Pre-TF toy that didn’t make it?  Tell us about in the comments section below.