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Showing posts with label designs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label designs. Show all posts
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Promoting Evil II: Unedited Evil
Since people have been doing their own color-corrections of the Marvel UK mini-posters based on the ones I did, I thought it'd be a good idea to put up the original versions of my scans. Maybe they'll be easier to work with - I think I ended up making Skywarp's face in the Megatron image too dark when I did mine. Apologies for not getting these up sooner!
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Promoting Evil!
It can! It is! It's... me, Monzo!
Fresh from 1984 - and imported over the Atlantic, besides - have a trio of promotional mini-posters featuring Soundwave, the Decepticon jets, and Megatron, made using stills from the earliest Transformers comic and toy commercials. These ridiculously high-resolution scans were made, respectively, from Marvel UK's Transformers #4, #5 and #6.
I actually scanned these some time ago, but at the time wrote them off as being useless because, due to the terrible color reproduction involved, they were incredibly red-tinged. However, I recently learned about Photoshop's "Variations" tool (which is kind of embarrassing, given how long I've had the program), and my new stab at fixing them up produced much better results. Megatron is still terribly yellowish, though.
Fun fact: in these scans, Starscream is the one with the grey chest and white/red wings! These early ads seem to have been the source of his first Marvel Comics color scheme, which appears to have switched the grey to blue because of comics' limited color palette at the time.
There were also mini-posters featuring Optimus Prime and the Autobot cars, but their animation designs didn't change as drastically, so I didn't scan them at the time. Might go back and do them anyway now...
Enjoy!
Fresh from 1984 - and imported over the Atlantic, besides - have a trio of promotional mini-posters featuring Soundwave, the Decepticon jets, and Megatron, made using stills from the earliest Transformers comic and toy commercials. These ridiculously high-resolution scans were made, respectively, from Marvel UK's Transformers #4, #5 and #6.
I actually scanned these some time ago, but at the time wrote them off as being useless because, due to the terrible color reproduction involved, they were incredibly red-tinged. However, I recently learned about Photoshop's "Variations" tool (which is kind of embarrassing, given how long I've had the program), and my new stab at fixing them up produced much better results. Megatron is still terribly yellowish, though.
Fun fact: in these scans, Starscream is the one with the grey chest and white/red wings! These early ads seem to have been the source of his first Marvel Comics color scheme, which appears to have switched the grey to blue because of comics' limited color palette at the time.
There were also mini-posters featuring Optimus Prime and the Autobot cars, but their animation designs didn't change as drastically, so I didn't scan them at the time. Might go back and do them anyway now...
Enjoy!
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Blogging is the right of all sentient beings
Oh, terrific. A new Transformers blog. Just what the world needs. Yawn.
Backing up a bit. I'm a huge fan of Transformers, and have been ever since I first saw a commercial for them back in 1984. It blew my eight year old mind. In the two plus decades since, my interest has only grown. From Simon Furman to Marty Isenberg, from Beast Wars to the 2007 motion picture, from Alpha Trion to Omega Supreme, I love the whole tapestry.
The designs in particular have always appealed to me. I stumbled across images of the character models of the G1 Decepticons back in the 90s and fell in love. The clean lines, the front and back views, the head turns . . . I found them immensly beautiful. I learned what they were and who drew them and began the slow process of tracking them down. Some of them were relatively easy. Fans like Doug Dlin had photocopies of the Japanese laser disks and were willing to share them. Guide books published in the 80s, mostly in Japan, sometimes had additional models. But I wanted more. Hasbro, unfortunately, had not archived this material. As luck would have it though, several professionals who had worked on the series, like the amazingly classy Bob Budiansky and Paul Davids, had saved much of the material they had worked with so many years before. Eventually I stockpiled a vast collection, probably the largest in the world.
In 2006, I approached Chris Ryall, editor in chief of IDW Publishing with the idea of publishing a book of character models. Being a man of refinement and taste, he of course agreed. By May of 2007, The Ark (V1) was a reality. I had to limit the scope, so I focused on the American television series, all four seasons. Sales were strong and the fan (and, gratifyingly, professional) reaction was quite positive. We moved ahead with The Ark (V2), focusing on Japanese character designs. If anything, the response was even better.
Which brings me to today. I've still got a ton of models that I have yet to find an appropriate venue for. So, what's a Transformers fan with a surfeit of material to do? I thought that a blog might be a good place to share some of the material that didn't make it into volume 1 and 2.
Here is my first offering. These models are for the alien prisoners in the G1 cartoon episode Chaos, written by the aforementioned Paul Davids. Early drafts of the script had Kup interacting with organic alien prisoners. Though the script was changed to involve robot prisoners, character models were developed for the organic prisoners.
11/20/2008 addendum - Monzo over at the Transformers Wiki pointed out that these models actually did make their way into the show, in the episode Starscream's Ghost. Cheers, Monzo!
There you have it! I love feedback, so be sure to let me know if you've enjoyed these models. Watch this space for more to come. Oh, and I'm always looking for more models. If you have any that you haven't seen in on of my books or on this blog, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Cheers!
Backing up a bit. I'm a huge fan of Transformers, and have been ever since I first saw a commercial for them back in 1984. It blew my eight year old mind. In the two plus decades since, my interest has only grown. From Simon Furman to Marty Isenberg, from Beast Wars to the 2007 motion picture, from Alpha Trion to Omega Supreme, I love the whole tapestry.
The designs in particular have always appealed to me. I stumbled across images of the character models of the G1 Decepticons back in the 90s and fell in love. The clean lines, the front and back views, the head turns . . . I found them immensly beautiful. I learned what they were and who drew them and began the slow process of tracking them down. Some of them were relatively easy. Fans like Doug Dlin had photocopies of the Japanese laser disks and were willing to share them. Guide books published in the 80s, mostly in Japan, sometimes had additional models. But I wanted more. Hasbro, unfortunately, had not archived this material. As luck would have it though, several professionals who had worked on the series, like the amazingly classy Bob Budiansky and Paul Davids, had saved much of the material they had worked with so many years before. Eventually I stockpiled a vast collection, probably the largest in the world.
In 2006, I approached Chris Ryall, editor in chief of IDW Publishing with the idea of publishing a book of character models. Being a man of refinement and taste, he of course agreed. By May of 2007, The Ark (V1) was a reality. I had to limit the scope, so I focused on the American television series, all four seasons. Sales were strong and the fan (and, gratifyingly, professional) reaction was quite positive. We moved ahead with The Ark (V2), focusing on Japanese character designs. If anything, the response was even better.
Which brings me to today. I've still got a ton of models that I have yet to find an appropriate venue for. So, what's a Transformers fan with a surfeit of material to do? I thought that a blog might be a good place to share some of the material that didn't make it into volume 1 and 2.
Here is my first offering. These models are for the alien prisoners in the G1 cartoon episode Chaos, written by the aforementioned Paul Davids. Early drafts of the script had Kup interacting with organic alien prisoners. Though the script was changed to involve robot prisoners, character models were developed for the organic prisoners.
11/20/2008 addendum - Monzo over at the Transformers Wiki pointed out that these models actually did make their way into the show, in the episode Starscream's Ghost. Cheers, Monzo!
There you have it! I love feedback, so be sure to let me know if you've enjoyed these models. Watch this space for more to come. Oh, and I'm always looking for more models. If you have any that you haven't seen in on of my books or on this blog, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Cheers!
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