| STARSCREAM (ELECTRUM
COATED)
PROJECT #249
CLASSIFICATION: REPAINT
BASE FIGURE: HEROES OF CYBERTRON STARSCREAM (OTFCC REPAINT)
MATERIALS USED: ACRYLIC PAINT, HOBBY KNIFE
FIRST APPEARANCE: "THE GOLDEN LAGOON"
"Don't you want to be invulnerable like Thrust,
here? See? Not a mark on him!"
Preamble: This is a silly and obvious
repaint, but I wanted to do it anyway. For those who haven't seen "The
Golden Lagoon," Beachcomber discovers a hidden paradise that includes a pool
of liquid electrum, a golden metal that adheres to substances and makes them
impervious to damage. Beachcomber hides this discovery from the Autobots
because he doesn't want to risk anything happening to his newfound paradise,
but the Decepticons end up finding it anyway, and the entire place is
turned into a battlefield. (What's really funny is Beachcomber never
actually admits that he did anything wrong. I guess one way to avoid
sitting through one of Prime's lectures is to pretend it wasn't his fault.
But I digress.)
Anyway, the Decepticons spent the better part
of the show coated with the stuff, so I figure if I'm going to be making
all these action figures based on characters who have two seconds of screen
time, I can certainly do a version of a character like Starscream who spent
almost an entire episode in different colors. (If you're not a Starscream
fan, feel free to look at this as electrum-coated Thundercracker or Skywarp
or Slaughterhouse or whoever.)
Construction: From the onset, I knew
that I wanted this project to be a little more than just a simple
let's-paint-him-gold-and-call-it-good repaint. For starters, I didn't
want to use gold paint at all, since that's not what color he is in the cartoon.
The animators used an orangey-yellow color with inked-in highlights,
which were used to represent gold, but I was going for a more authentic,
ripped-from-the-episode look. After laying down the base color, I went
back with some black paint and carefully applied the highlights. Some
of them are Y-shaped, like the way the G.I. Joe animators drew the
highlights on Cobra Commander's face mask. (I didn't want to go too
crazy with them, since the animators were pretty frugal in their application.
More than anything else, I think they were there just to remind the
color key people to paint the characters yellow.)
I knew I'd run into problems with the Decepticon
symbols, since I didn't want to leave them purple, but I also didn't want
them to completely disappear when I painted over them. I realized that
all the other panel lines and things on the toy were etched into the original
sculpt, so I decided to do the same thing with his insignias, carefully carving
out the outlines of the symbols so that they'd remain visible, even when
completely covered in paint. (I did a lot of liberal bending of the
wings to stretch the plastic and give myself more room to work with, being
careful not to cut too deeply into the plastic since I had to do this for
both sides of each wing.)
Comments: I think he turned out pretty
nicely. He even looks good from multiple angles, something I was kind
of worried about. Ironically, the paint I used had absolutely no gloss
to it, so the figure relies entirely upon the black stripes to create the
illusion of a reflective sheen. |
 |
