CarBot: The REAL Transformer

This has been a long time coming- like, a year. (I should know by now that it takes me about a year to finish most personal art projects, because I need to put something down for the Crocker Standard Artistic Gestating Period (CSAGP) of ten months.)
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Anyway, the challenge I posed to myself after being underwhelmed by the design of the robots in Michael Bay's Transformers was to build a model as close to an actual Transformer as possible; meaning, NO MAGICAL PARTS could appear to bulk up the end result.

What makes Transformers so amazing (for me) is that an inventor, took a physical toy car and created a puzzle that every little boy has to solve to get a robot and back again. It's so impressive and fun. To me Tranformers have always been about the toys, rather than the cartoon or …that movie, which is really based on the cartoon.*



I bought a plastic car model, sketched a quick, basic design, and set to work chopping the car up and piecing together a physical robot where the feet transformed from the back half of the car, the engine became head, and the doors opened into arms. I did, in fact, run out of pieces to make the robot have any limb definition, and as a result, used up the plastic frames the pieces came from, cutting them into conduits and skeletal components where needed(mostly the legs and forearms).



Painting is a struggle for me, mostly because I always change my process and can never decide on colors. For this guy, I primed him white with Krylon flat white, and then masked off the panels that would have the car's color and sprayed the rest of the undercarriage and inner parts black. Some of these components should have been painted before gluing, namely the interior of the car, which was a colossal headache later on in the process (two-fold really: I didn't spray it darker earlier and then when I DID start painting it, I was paying far too much attention to detail for something that was going to be completely covered up and obscured.)



What you see here is the original light blue color I mixed. My thought process was this- I didn't want to do yellow like Bumblebee and I didn't want to do the nice dark purple from the model's package; I can't do white because it would look weird and silver was too close to white. I started with blue and then after letting the model sit half painted for months, changed my mind and settled on the semi-drab metallic green you see here. I feel much better about the green because I remember my mom's old Carmen Ghia having this faded green color, as well as a Mustang on the street where I grew up.




So there you go. Mission Accomplished! A 1971 Plymouth Barracuda Transformer that is built (theoretically) using only machinery available from the mass of the actual car.

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*The animation that ILM created for the movie's transformations was really cool. However, if you pay attention, you can count on one hand the number of actual fully-on-screen transformations that take place. Most of them with Bumblebee.