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 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!

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!

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!

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.

As I was cruising ebay looking at customs, trying to find inspiration, I came across this little gem:

It’s a Tigertrack custom.  Tigertrack is basically yellow-Diaclone-Sideswipe, who got a TF-character-bio during Takara and E-Hobby’s retcon’ing binge of shoehorning the diaclone-alternate-colors into G1.

When the Universe Sideswipe/Sunstreaker mold was released, Hasbro/Takara designed it so that you could achieve either of the traditional robot-mode configuations from the same toy.  This made making a Tigertrack custom a simple matter of a little part-swapping.

Reprolebels, even came up with a lovely little cat-themed sticker set to help complete the look.   Good enough, right? 

Well this chap from the wilds of ebay takes it one step further by sporting Silverbolt/Energon-Stormjet’s head, which, conveniently, has a helmet which really has a cat-ear feel to it, and yet still basically resembles Sideswipe’s head.

I think it looks GREAT, and I may have to do this head-swap on my Tigertrack now!

Do you have any killer head-swap ideas?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Hoping to get "Friday's" entry up sometime during the day Saturday.

In the meantime, be sure to read Thursday's blog and enter the contest.  

I got permission to give the winner a REALLY good prize, so it's going to be worth your effort, for sure!

Thanks for your patience!

YR wasn’t familiar with the Action Master version of the character (I’m keeping who a secret, but there’s a picture of his vintage toy in this article), so our conversation evolved into a mini-discussion of how the Action Masters all *looked* right, but in most cases were actually pretty off-model color-wise.

I said I should do a Thursday-Theory blog about it, and here we are!

The Action Master subline is something of an anathema to many fans, but Hasbro was trying to do something very interesting.   It was 1990, it had been 3 years since the toys on the shelves had matched the characters on the cartoon (In America anyway).   Toy sales were starting to slow, but the Transformers cartoon was still in infinite syndication, and popular as ever (at least it was among me and my cohorts!).

Apparently Hasbro’s strategy was to put a whole bunch of new product on the shelves representing the still-popular characters from the cartoon.   They’d already had some success with this strategy the previous year when they included Bumblbee, Jazz, Grimlock, and Starscream as pretenders.

Reportedly, these sold very well (much better than the other Pretenders and Micromasters on the shelves at the time), and also did very well in K-Mart where they were sold without the Pretender-shells.  Go figure, kids wanted transformer toys of characters they already knew!

As we all know, it takes a LOT of effort to engineer a transforming toy.   There’s a lot of R&D time, and each character represents a huge investment.   Hasbro wanted to bring back most of their original cast of characters, but the toyline wasn’t plastic-gold like it used to be, so it would have been pretty risky to try a “Classics” style revival in 1990!

Their solution?   Based on the premise that kids wanted action-figures of their favorite characters more so than they cared about the conversion-play-pattern, they created a series of figures with GI-Joe style construction who were designed to resemble the animation-models of the Transformer characters.

Check out this clip from the first commercial:  

I LOVE the super-stylized character design they gave Prime.  But what I really want to point out is the moment where the animation-transitions to toy-photography.  It happens twice, once with Prime center-frame, then later with Megatron and his cohorts.  In each case, the animation actually dissolves to reveal the toy underneath is a perfect 1-to-1 representation of the animation.

In effect Hasbro is saying, "Look kids, now you can REALLY play with the cartoon-characters, they’re in your hand, just the way they look on screen!"   Let’s not forget how many toys got heavily re-designed for the cartoon, almost NONE of the mini-bots look like their on-screen counterparts for instance, so this kind of “They look like the show” design-approach really was a huge new idea.

I was a little older in 1990, and only picked up a couple of Action Masters at the time, but I found them infinitely charming.  Poseable with no risk of breakage, in a MUCH better scale with the other toys (I bought Blaster and Shockwave for instance, who TOWERED over almost everyone else in their original versions), and in many ways just more fun to play with.   I missed the conversion-factor, but I DID like the ACTION-FIGURE’ness of them!

All of which is a long way of saying that Hasbro took a big risk on making a bunch of non-transforming toys that looked like the cartoon.

Given the gamble, you’d think that (within the limits of the GI-Joe style construction) they would have done everything possible to make the toys “screen accurate.”  But again, Hasbro defied expectations, gambling that the 6yr old boy would be more concerned about a toy that looked “cool” (and resembled the cartoon) than whether it met the adult-collector standard of “accurate.”

Two very bold and risky choices, but I think they came up with a really slick-looking assortment of figures, and we can learn a lot from their choices.

So, now, we’ll play a little game.   I’m going to post pictures of all the “On-Screen” Action Master characters.  Your assignment is to count up how many times Hasbro has “Misplaced” the COLOR-MAPPING vs. the standard color Sunbow animation model.   Here’s an easy example:

   vs.   

(Thanks to Zobovor for the picture)

Action Master Optimus has the following Color-Mapping “errors”:

1. Head-crest is orange instead of silver
2. Eyes are orange instead of blue
3. Smokestacks are red instead of silver
4. Wrists are blue rather than red
5. Windows are bordered in silver instead of red
6. Crotch is silver instead of blue
7. Thighs are blue instead of silver
8. Detail on side of legs are blue instead of silver

We’ll ignore the neon-orange uzi.   Neon-orange uzis are cool. 

Actually most of the Action Master weapons are….interesting, so we’ll just not get into that.   There’re a few lessons to be taken from the Optimus example.   At first glance the Action Master certainly looks “right,” it looks like Optimus.   Also, we should notice that many of the coloring choices were not owing to any limitations on the availability of paint applications.   The color-map could probably be made “right” without adding any additional applications.  As it stands he’s got as many “extra” paint applications as he does “missing” ones, and in a few cases, you could just switch colors between existing applications to get it “right.”

This tells me that all the color choices were carefully considered and selected intentionally.   Except for maybe the blue thighs, I actually like the Action Master’s color-map better than Animation-Model Prime.  The orange head-crest/eyes and silver-outlined windows really *pop*, and I think the blue forearms make him look like he’s got powerful arms, rather than that he’s just wearing blue “gloves.”

So my point is this: slavishly mapping the G1(or other)-color scheme from an old toy, or an old cartoon onto your new custom may not always result in the most attractive finish.  The Action Masters are a GREAT example of how you can change a LOT of details and still have the characters “look like themselves.”

So, here begins the game: you need to figure out HOW MANY details got changed.  Again, just color-placement, and vs. Sunbow G1 Animation Models (I’m going to let you get out your own DVD’s and do your own Google searches to make it more sporting).  Accessories don’t count.  SHADES of color don’t count (Cherry-red vs Maroon).  Optimus’s list doesn’t count towards your total, but if you find any I missed, I’ll award bonus points.

The person who finds the most legitimate color-mapping “errors” will win a prize from the Kidbash store.   I haven’t decided what yet, but I’ll give the winner a choice from a few things, and I’ll make sure they’re good options.

So without further ado, your Action Master “On Screen Cast” (all taken from Generations)

Email your lists of differences to me at destrongerlupus @ hotmail.com (no spaces) and put “Kidbash Contest” in the subject line.  I’ll announce the winner(s) on March 15^th as part of our re-launch celebration!

But tonight, I'm going to share a little something special from the Kidbash workshop that will be coming to our store very soon.

 A while back, Kidbash community member Gestalt suggested a REALLY special product idea that fit in perfectly with our vision for what Kidbash should be.

He had an idea for a "Modular Head System,"  basically his notion was to have a multi-part face/helmet system that was infinitely swappable.

Well, we set our man, Robert the Sledgehammer, on the task, and pretty soon he came up with this:

We're still refining it, and recently changed the side-nubs (designed to aid with alignment) to something that will probably cast up a little better:

We're in the process of testing the head out, and are starting to work up sketches for more face and helmet designs.   Here are some rough concept sketches of the faces we're currently working on:

Kidbash is working hard to create all the kitbashing products and accessories we've always dreamed of having!

Be sure to drop YOUR ideas in the Spark-Plug, so that we can help make them a reality. 

There’s a lot of solutions floating around, the one currently in vogue seems to be the use of Kyrlon Fusion as a base-coat.  That brand is formulated to bond to plastic, and does better than most, but it’s certainly not impervious to wear:

Notice my prepped-Roadbuster’s knee and the door-plate .  Transforming him a few times has stripped more than a few parts right back down to the plastic.

Worse still, the layers of paint have made many of the friction joints too tight to work properly.

I’ve got some plans to salvage this guy, for instance I’ve started doing a little black-sharpie work on his waist hinge above.   With some strategic painting, and creative use of the sharpie, I’ll get him back into shape for my personal collection, but I want to get a REALLY perfect Roadbuster put together, and this guy ain’t gonna be it!

One way of avoiding this sort of thing is by sanding all the rub-points down a few millimeters, effectively allowing room for the layers of paint you’re going to add.  There are a few problems with this approach:  It’s very time consuming.  It can be hard to anticipate where all the rub points will be (I wouldn’t have thought about the door edges).  You run the risk of losing sculpt-detail.  And even in the best case scenario, REAL tight spots are still bound to rub off.

So what’s a kitbasher to do?

I like to dye my figures.   This technique has been on a popularity roller-coaster for a while now.   Transformer-custom circles first got a taste of the technique when there was a spate of Energon Megatrons dyed into nice Purple Galvatrons.  The results were too smooth to possibly be paint (or so it seemed at the time), and the pioneering artists soon revealed that they were in fact dying the figures.

The technique is not without limitations.   It’s very messy.  It can cause damage to clothing and countertops.   It’s fairly slow (or at least it feels that way).   Different plastics (often on the same figure) will absorb pigment at different rates (or not at all).   To get really good results, you’re going to need to use the toxic and flammable substance acetone.  And finally, you’re going to have to consult your color wheel, because unlike paint, dye essentially MIXES with the plastic’s original color, so your palette is going to be limited.

The down-sides aside, the main advantage of dying a figure is that the color that results is TRULY permanent.  It only goes down into the plastic just so far, so you COULD wear the part down to the original color with a great deal of play, and if you cut the part open, you’d find the inner color unchanged, but for durability, you’re never going to find a better technique!

So, let’s look at the process!

Shown above is a small pot (you’ll not want to eat out of it after using it for dyeing, so make sure to use an old one, or buy a new one just for this kind of work), a bottle of Rit dye (available in the laundry-section of most grocery and department stores), a bottle of acetone-based nail-polish-remover, some drop-cloths, a wire-basket, and the figure I want to dye.

The basket is actually a silverware-caddy that I had laying around, it has little feet on the bottom (we’ll get to that in a minute) and an enclosing structure of bars.  I want to actually get something with a smaller mesh, but this works pretty well.

The MAIN failure-point when dying plastic toys like this is having them get warped by the heat of the stovetop.   There’s a few ways to avoid that, you can dip one part at a time by hand, you can stir the parts in the pot constantly, or, as I’m going to do, you can contrive a way to leave the parts in the pot, but have them a few centimeters off of the “floor” of the pot.   Basically as long as the parts are up off the bottom, you can pretty much “set it and forget it,” which is GREAT, because it can take quite a while for the pigment to impregnate the plastic.

Having filled the pot with just enough water so that I can get good coverage in my parts-cage, I toss in a good splash of dye (feel free to measure it according to the directions, but I’ve not found that it makes too much difference as long as you get enough in there to really darken up the water), and set the pot to boil.

Since a watched-pot-never-boils, I set to work disassembling Cap’.  You’ll see I kept his screws aside, as well as his fists, head, and the bit that his legs attach to inside of his waist-plate.  None of these parts needed to be dyed, so I won’t bother with them.

You can also see above that I’ve arranged a few parts in the cage, ready for submersion!

Once the water starts to boil, I quickly back the heat off, and carefully stir in the acetone nail-polish remover.  I chose to not add the acetone at the beginning, because it can be volatile, and I didn’t want to risk it getting too hot while I wasn’t minding the pot.

Once it’s all mixed up, however, it’s simply a matter of submerging the parts…and waiting.

After about 10 minutes, I fished the part on the left out of the pot (it kept slipping out of the cage; be careful of that, remember, if any part sits on the pot’s bottom it could become warped beyond use!).  As you can see, it’s already turned a nice chocolate color.

Here is the same part next to my painted and shaded Roadbuster.   A bit different, but I kind of like the dyed one’s color a little better!

The Blue parts are not turning brown, but rather becoming black.   Remember what I said above about the colors MIXING rather than over-laying, this is what I was talking about.   Also notice that the silver-paint is pretty much un-touched by the dye.   The dye will never do anything but lightly-tint a paint application.    This can actually be used to your advantage in some projects, so keep it in mind!  Also, factory-applied paint-apps are rarely on rub-points, so they’ll be safe to paint over anyway.

You’ll notice above that the tire didn’t shift colors very much.   This is a good example of how some plastics will absorb the dye faster than others.   The tires are actually a very light color, so its definitely the density (or other property) of the wheels preventing absorption.

Because I’m dying my parts in small batches, you can see that I’m ending up with a few different shades of brown.   This can be hard to control, so if you’re planning on using the dyed-color as your final finish, be very careful to keep as many parts in the dye at the same time as you can manage, or at least make sure that parts that are “matched” or which will be next to each other when assembled get dyed together.

A few more minutes (well, 10 or 15 more minutes), and the formerly-blue part on the left is a nice dark black color.   

Here’s another great example of two different plastics reacting differently.  This part started out as a uniform blue color, but after just one or two minutes the softer jointed-part has turned jet-black, while the harder square part is barely tinted.   The jointed piece is one of the worst rub-points on the whole figure, so I’m glad Hasbro made it of nice dye’able plastic!

So after an hour or so of bending over the range and breathing super-heated acetone fumes (make sure you have your hood vent on, and are wearing a respiratory mask!), I’ve got a nicely colored figure:

Far from the final colors, but no longer the neon red and blue that the figure started out.   

As you can see, the color is pretty uneven on some of the parts, but I’m going to be applying a few layers of paint before I call this puppy “finished.”

There are several advantages I have now:

Many of the parts are now a very nice uniform black or brown color.  Moreover, many of those parts are at rub-points.  When I paint this one up I am going to strategically mask off many of the joints and rub-points.   Now that the ENTIRE figure is starting out permanently colored in shades that are complimentary to my final palette, I can work WITH the figure’s design, rather than trying to cover every square inch with paint.

Because the base-color of the figure is now much closer to my desired final shades, I’ll be able to apply a LOT fewer coats of paint, which will keep the molded detail crisper and cleaner, and make for an over all better look.

Finally, if during handling, any paint DOES chip (but between leaving the worst-parts unpainted, and the thinner over all paint-profile, this should almost be a non-issue), the color revealed under the chipped-paint will naturally blend into the over all design, arguably adding character rather than revealing the Marvel-hero-spandex beneath Roadbuster’s crusty exterior.

Like everything else in this art-form, this approach is not flawless or limitless, but of all the available options, I feel like dye gives you the most bang for your buck.

Have a chip-proof color technique that works better?   Tell us about it in the comments section below!