Here’s my completed Shattered Glass Nightbeat! Finally I got the rest of the flames off the doors. What’s my secret? Well, uh, I realized there was some extremely fine sandpaper in the paint box. I misstook it for wax paper for the longest time, but I realized one side was a little rough, and I went to town on the doors. Well, not really “to town.” I just had to get rid of the rest of the lingering flame deco shadow. That shit was stubborn.
(And no, by “extremely fine” I don’t mean I “went to town” on it.)
So, you know. Some paint happened, after all that was done. Most of the paint was extremely easy. I mean, it’s just flat black. That shit paints itself. It’s that damn yellow mohawk I needed to paint that gave me trouble. I must have tried that thing a billion times. Yellow paint sucked. Finally, I found my silver Sharpie, used that as a base coat, and then the yellow paint stopped just puddling off like Nightbeat was in the shower. Still wasn’t thick enough to actually make it look like the bright yellow it’s supposed to be, but whatever. It’s done.
Jin Saotome was gracious in instructing me in how to put his decals on. It was forever ago that Shawn Tessmann, the BotCon customizer guy, told me how these things work. So Jin gave me a ringy-dingy, told me what’s what, and the that was done. …at like 3 in the morning. I keep late nights. Mirrorverse Nightbeat was finally completed!
…until the next morning when I remembered that Cosmic Rust infections were part of his deco. That was a few more hours.
Anyway, this is Shattered Glass Nightbeat. There were some speedbumps, like when I had to cannibalize him some of Energon Hot Shot’s knee/roofs because the alcohol crumbled the originals. And the whole flame deco removal thing. But I think he came out pretty nice, in the end. And because most of him isn’t paint, since he’s just black detail on an unpainted toy, he transforms back and forth pretty seamlessly. (It helps that, unlike the Animated Minerva I put together myself at BotCon 2011′s customization class, this toy was put together by Chinese workers. So it actually fits together well, and wasn’t assembled by a moron.)
Hooray! That’s the only version of a Hot Shot toy I didn’t own. Cross that off my bucket list!
Heh, paint removal is always so much fun. Here is a tip, I am not sure what is in America, but here in the UK we have a brass shining product called Brasso. Brasso is a very mild abrasive, so with a cloth and a few drips of Brasso, you can get a lot of paint off.
Good custom there. I mostle redeco Zoids myself.
It’s Brasso over here, shit works great!
Impressive custom. Only one suggestion, maybe put some (more?) silver inside the circular thing on his chest. The SG Nightbeat on the Wiki, has some there at least.
Then again maybe that spot didn’t photo well, and everything is fine.
Never mind. Took a closer look & it one of those marble symbol things. Totally skipped Energon & forgot they used those.
*Sigh*…nice work…he looks great. The cosmic rust looks awesome. This just makes me want to turn my Generations Tracks into Get Away that much more….
I’m not sure how well it would work on a transformer, but simple green is usually good at stripping warhammer models. Also for painting yellow well, it takes multiple layers. First a dark base coat, then you take it up with multiple brown layers, getting a lighter shade with each pass. Then a beige before you get to a white layer. Then once the white is good, getting a good even yellow should be no problem.
He looks sweeeeeeeeeeet! Nice job man, and I’m liking the cosmic rust apps!
Freakin yellow, or red. Those colors will never go on over dark ones. The solution, snag some Testors Pale Grey and use that as a ‘primer’. But Jin, why not use white? Because for some reason white is just like yellow and red, it takes 10 coats and THEN you can do yellow. But that pale grey is really light, coats and sticks great. You can use it to primer most anything.
I reallu dig what you did there. SG Nightbeat is one of my faves too. I did an Alternators version a few years back to boot