CLASSIFICATION: ILLUSTRATION
MATERIALS USED: PENCIL AND INK PEN, ADOBE PHOTODELUXE
FIRST APPEARANCE: CYBCON 2004

"It is a world transformed, where things are not what they seem.  It is the world of the Transformer® Robots... a world of heroic Autobot® Robots and evil Decepticon® Robots!"

Preamble:  Due to time constraints and whatnot, I wasn't  really up for building and painting this year's CybCon exclusive toys (for what would have been the fourth year in a row), but I still wanted to do the artwork for the toys.  In addition to the portraits of Slaughterhouse and Bumblebee for their packaging, I came up with a battle scene that features all the CybCon exclusive toys up to this point, plus a handful of other character incarnations thrown in as red herrings.  (My original plan was to upload the art at some point prior to the convention so we could keep the public guessing as to which ones this year's exclusives actually were.)

You may recognize the illustration as an homage to the original Hasbro battle scene, as seen on the back of the box of all the Transformers toys from 1984.  It seemed as fitting a tribute as any to honor the 20th anniversary of the toy line.  Spychanger Optimus Prime, of course, replaced the original Prime.  (He's carrying Safety Megatron, a nod to the version of the toy Hasbro offered during a demonstration of what sorts of changes would have to be made to the G1 toy in order to sell it domestically.)  Spychanger Brawn replaced Sunstreaker in the shot (complete with inappropriately-placed, sideways Autobot symbols).  Alternators Smokescreen, in G1 colors, took the place of Prowl.  Bumblebee got replaced with a pink version of the Bumper toy (which is probably a female character, and one of our red herrings; I've taken to calling her Fender).  The Autobots in the upper left-hand corner got replaced with the Cybertronic versions of Bumblebee (one of this year's exclusives) and Wheeljack and Jazz (just to throw people off a little).

On the Decepticon side of things, we have Slaughterhouse,  the other exclusive for this year, taking Starscream's place in the original art (and carrying a gun-mode Shockmaster, one of the Constructicon-colored Shockwaves from "Five Faces of Darkness").  Behind him is Megatron (yes, two Megatrons appear in this piece), in his G1 body but with his G2 tank colors.  Above him is Scavenger, taking Soundwave's spot.  Up above, in place of Ravage, is pre-Armada Cyclonus, in his regular colors as well as a second version in Powerlinx colors (we considered doing a chase version of the 2003 exclusive in these colors, but decided against it).  Bringing up the rear are Cybertronic versions of Action Master Thundercracker, G2 Ramjet, Monody (the Dirge-colored skyraider) and Twilight (Raksha's "Lady in Purple," who's almost too small to be visible).

The background is, of course, taken from the original 1984 art.  I actually went ahead and completely erased all the G1 characters from the scene, which would enable me to just drop the new characters into the scene in more-or-less  the exact same spots.  (I fudged things just a bit here and there.  I took Sideswipe and Trailbreaker out of the shot, for example, since Spychanger Prime's shoulders are a lot bigger and would have covered them up.  I also didn't bother doing a Laserbeak equivalent since it wouldn't have made any sense for anybody to be ejecting from Scavenger.)

This illustration is actually built from about 70 different layers.  Most of them are laser blasts, thruster engine trails, lighting effects, swoosh effects, and things of that nature.  (Slaughterhouse alone required around 30 effects layers, which were laid in at varying levels of transparency to help create the illusion of being in motion.)  I drew in all the laser blasts and such, but the pen lines only served as placeholders for the final effects, which were all created by hand on the computer.  (I refuse to let other programmers dictate the look of my artwork, which is why you'll never see my illustrations cluttered with lensflare effects.)