Here's presenting movie styled Shattered Glass Rodimus! A sort of technical successor to the previous classics version, the flame work on this guy is decidedly more delicate and more flame-like. When I saw the Sidearm Sideswipe mold, I
knew that he is destined for a Rodimus repaint.
A pretty simple project to say the least, the steps I took are:
Krylon black base coat
Silver, gold, blue detailing
white flame base with purple tint overlay
Future clear coat
I did this project with several experiments in mind, which are:
I want to test the effectiveness of Krylon Fusion in bonding to plastic, and it's usefulness as a primer.
It certainly is stronger than Gunze flat black as a base coat, but it will still scratch more easily than I'm comfortable with.
How small are the smallest flames possible with my airbrush? How realistic can I get real fire?
Flames can be pretty small, in fact. With a low air pressure and very thin paint, I can even do smoke trails almost 2 mm in width. But this takes a lot of care and risk.
Annoyingly, the white Gunze paint I used always failed on me. No matter what tricks I tried to get it the correct consistency, it will either splurt out in thick drops, or in drippy streams getting over all my previous flames. I had to do many cycles (at least 5) of spraying over in black for correction and re-spraying, including a few minutes of pulling my fur out.
Strangely, I never had that problem with the rest of my paints. Rargh.
In the end the flame effects were more muffled than I'd like, but I decided to call it a day. Until the next flamin' project...
Practice more on my small scale sculpting.
I intentionally included teeth and whiskers in my face sculpt just to see how small I can go. I was pretty satisfied with the results!
Also...
Here's some advice for you guys. Because of his transformation scheme, he has plenty of rub spots on his car shell as everything was crammed into his torso. The picture below has the spots circled. It was unfortunate that the markings appeared after I sprayed my clear coat, but to those who want to do a repaint of SS, make sure to sand down the contact points sufficiently and you shouldn't have a problem. Also, the soft material used on the side mirrors do not take kindly to Krylon paint.
So in conclusion, here he is, SG Rodimus movie style.
Flickr is
here.
