Soundwave

Soundwave was definitely my favorite Decepticon. As a child, I found his monotone and synthetic voice to be unforgettable. Future iterations of the character have not managed to recapture that magic for me though. Forget the voice of Siri and Alexa, if NASA were to let me anywhere near the voice of their future shuttle AI, this is what I would program it to sound like. This was the Decepticon that instilled fear in me. Cold, unfeeling, calculating, and seemingly dispassionate - he was the one Cybertronian that ticks off that fear of the rise of the machines. His small army of extremely loyal minibots made him a force onto himself. It was fortunate for Megatron that Soundwave was unfailingly loyal.

This is also my favorite of the official Masterpiece Decepticons. The figure captures everything iconic about the character and is better engineered than any of the Seekers. The minions are smaller than I would have liked, but I can understand the need to make them fit into his chest. I can't wait to replace them with the oversized ones from Ocular Max though. Since I have the Hasbro version, I had to replace his yellow eye visor with a third party add-on. I suppose I could have painted it myself, but I didn't have the confidence to paint back then.

I shot Masterpiece Soundwave, Laserbeak and Ocular Max Jaguar in a light tent, propping KFC Mandy on a USB adapter. I used a purple filter on the lamps to impart some magenta highlights. In Photoshop, I added eye glows and cleaned up screw holes, especially on Mandy. I probably should have made Soundwave bigger, but I couldn't have without his legs and Jaguar disappearing off the bottom of the picture. Plus, I didn't want to obscure the background too much.

The reflection in the water is actually their real reflection. When the bottom edge of your subject is uneven, it is not a trivial exercise of copying and flipping the picture. Fortunately, my plexiglass surface is very reflective. I did apply a Gaussian blur to give the reflection a more watery effect. I also added water lines because I've been watching Bob Ross.

The background is of the Washington Monument during a recent trip to Washington DC. I woke up at 2:30 am PST and faced the 40 degree weather (still can't comprehend that number) to take pictures. I wished the sky had been more dramatic with clouds.

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No way! Two can play!

KFC Transistor and Masterpiece Ravage were shot separately and layered on each other. I had to erase part of Transistor's foot, much like they did for the cartoon in this shot. When drawing, the artists can sometimes ignore the realities of a physical body.

Transistor lacks the articulation to match that pose. His butt gets in the way of his leg articulation for a proper back kick. I wanted to keep his face in the shot so I also ended up turning him slightly differently than the source material.

Masterpiece Ravage didn't require any work, except for the eye glow. I added the debris cloud by clone stamping different parts of the figure.

The sky is just from a cloudy summer evening, shot with a Hoya FLW filter. The mountain is the rock formation at Natural Bridges Santa Cruz. The wall and window frames are the Mechanic Chain Base tiles with a Hue Saturation layer applied. This time, I added a subtle streak through the two upper windows to simulate glare.

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Run, Blaster! Save yourself!

Interestingly, Tesla is able to hold Rumble and Ratbat in his hands. Unfortunately, his articulation is somewhat limited so I couldn't reproduce the kneeling stance he had in The Movie. I'm still trying to figure out how to make the shadows look more natural.

The cannon is from TFC Toys Thanatos with his body masked out. The tower and and floor are from clone stamping panels of his body with the borders and edges smudged out.

I created the window frames by cutting out and transforming a section of a set of Mechanical Chain Base panels. I really need to learn how to add a shiny glass effect.

The sky, clouds, mountains, and trees are from a local park.

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