Not today, Galvatron!

I tried to keep it simple today. No painstaking cut-outs this time. The background is just a blue poster board. There was a lot of fiddling with the figures and trial and error to get the composition that I wanted though. FansToys Sovereign stood in for Galvatron. His angry face works so well for this kind of scene. DX9 Carry stood in for Hot Rod's arm. I could have used Masterpiece Hot Rod, but I didn't want to deal with the height disparity between the two figures. The trickiest part was dealing with the Matrix. At first I tried to suspend it from string, but then realized I'd have to clean it in Photoshop so I simply resorted to balancing it on Sovereign's chest. The glow effect is from Inner and Outer Layer Style effects along with a Lens Flare render.

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Wings of Tyranny

This is a play on a picture I remember seeing as a kid. The caption for it was "The Sound of Freedom". I think it featured an F-15 Strike Eagle against a clear blue sky. Too many viewings of the Top Gun and Iron Eagle movies instilled in me a love of all things fighter jets. My poor eye-sight (and likely lack of skill, spacial awareness, and ability to handle such tense situations) would preclude me from living out any childhood dreams of becoming an ace pilot.

I used Universe Starscream for this project since it was already in jet mode. I had debated whether to put more jets into the picture, but decided against it since I don't have the other Seekers from the Universe line and would have had to resort to Hue/Saturation layers to change their colors. I didn't use the Masterpiece Seekers because I didn't want to bother transforming them.

Even as a child, I loved how the Decepticons turned the symbols of our defenders against us. Since the G1 cartoon seemed to be based in the United States, the animators could have chosen MiGs as the alt-modes for the Seekers, but even in the Bay movies, they chose our premier air superiority fighter. Maybe I'm over attributing this and the reason is as banal as easier licensing from a domestic company.

Also taking inspiration from The Force Awakens, I set Starscream against the sun rising over the Silicon Valley. It's actually a composite of a single shot taken from Black Mountain in Los Gatos. When I enlarged the picture so that the sun would be larger in frame, the clouds and mountains got pushed out of frame. I simply made a copy of that part of the picture and layered it back in.

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