I always thought this was probably the best BM Cheetor figure there was, but one fatal flaw still ruined him. His wonky arms only moved up and down, and wouldn't stay in place easily for even the very limited poses he could do. I cut away a good bit of the shoulders and locked those ball joints into place so the karate chop-chop gimmick is gone and the ability to have a decent robot mode stance now exists. Its not a huge amount of extra articulation, but enough to put him in some decent poses now. I also added silver and gunmetal to most of the gray plastic parts. Now my question to you guys is- Should I do more? I feel I fixed what sucked as best I could, and as not-Cheetor as the darker color scheme is, I really like it. Painting over the transparent chest would kill all that detail sculpted on the inside and the shiny matrix-like thing you can see in there. I usually don't like transparent colored parts for anything but windows and visors, but I like it on this figure. Also, painting him from such a dark color to yellow would be a pain, and would mean I'd need to be more careful with the figure forever since any little scrapes would show navy blue... Was a little improvement all this figure needed? Or should I keep this color scheme and add more silver and gold details, maybe even paint the abdominal section and do a gold-edges-fade-to-clear-middle on the chest? Maybe just paint him all gold and silver with a few yellow and green details? A dumb figure so who cares?
I came to the decision after I modded the shoulders on mine (I just added an extra joint, so nothing was really affected other than added articulation) that he's fine as is otherwise.
if you wanted to do a traditional BM cheetor you could dye all of the dark body parts with rit dye yellow so if you unfortanly get a scrape on it it wouldnt show the super dark colors through
Dyes only work when going from lighter colors to darker, the yellow wouldnt take on the blue, just probally turn it to a brown. Great work. I suggest mabe highlighting with some gold and silver in places, but keep the general dark look to him.
Thanks guyz! Going by the other comments, then yours, I agree. It seems a full repaint would in fact be more trouble then its worth, and as SQ said, the figure does look good as is after a bit of shoulder modification. I may go in and add some more gold and silver, but he doesn't need much more work. I actually really like the BM Cheetor head. This one achieved the look of it pretty well, though his head is a bit small...
Personally, I always thought this mold was the best. Granted, the head's a little small, but given the transformation, you have to give them props for how well it was done. Looking at it, it would actually fit in pretty well with Fall of Cybertron. Just slap in some bright paint to fill some of the hidden details, especially on the back, and he'd look like something Shockwave experimented on in game.