Found Red Alert and Thunderwing at a local Meijer about to be ousted to make way for the newest wave of bayformers, when it struck me... I've my other projects are on hold waiting for stuff to arrive in the mail, so I started on this guy since all I need is the paints and the figures. The original Black Shadow was retooled from Thunderwing to look less fleshy and more like a traditional bot. I'm trying to do the same thing here without impairing the toy's functionality. My first mod was to replace the hands and shoulders and switch about the upper arm to replace their curves with a more angular form. The pegs for Red Alert's hands were a glitch to file down, as Thunderwing's wrists are rather small. I'm also planning to use the two red and grey components, originally Red Alert's thighs, to cover the design of Thunderwing's chestplate since they do a fair job of imitating Black Shadow's own chestplate. More cutting and filing... yay... I just hope I don't slag it up. As far as painting him, I plan on sticking to flat paints and I'm going to attempt to keep anything visible in vehicle mode as unshiny as possible. I figure it to be that Black Shadow has a stealth thing going on and I'd like to reflect that by avoiding shiny chromey colors.
Nice ideas, but the original only had a remolded chest/head. If you leave the arms and legs the way they are, it would be more in line with the original. Of course if you really want to work on those arms and legs don't let me stop you, good luck on it.
I've got the extra parts, and I want him to have more of his own look when I set him next to Thunderwing. I'm not a big fan of "different" characters who're nothing more than straight repaints, quite a conundrum when it came to buying seekers, let me tell ya.
Looking good! I like this mold too, except for the whole "organic" feel they tried to give to it....particularly all those damn lines they carved into the jet sections. I keep wanting to sand them down, but the prospect of hours of work to do it keeps me from even beginning....Looking forward to your final product; hopefully it'll inspire me to finally get mine done too!
i slaggin LOVE it! i hope the next generations line doesnt include a black shadow cause yours would whup-aft =D
Alright, little update here. Done with most of the painting, just some detailing left that I'm too tired for. As a side project for Black Shadow, I'm going to take the little drone and combine it with an extra PCC minicon to make the "inner robot," but that'll wait till i get BS himself finished. Here's what the paint job looks like right now, I'm going to add some red and gold to the fuselage in places and I still have to paint the actual chest piece. As for that chest piece, I'm actually pretty impressed with what I was able to do with it working solely with the scraps from Red Alert. Using the main portion of the detachable engine and the upper thighs, I've come up with something that looks like a pretty good translation of the original look.
Very nice. And since Hasbro is making Black Shadow are you going to have two, but one is more badass than the other? IDK why I asked, but I guess if one gets trashed you got another one just in case. You know what I mean.
Alright everyone, here he is essentially finished. I need to buy the gold paint for the tail fins, but I'm quite pleased with how he turned out regardless. I'm still working on the head, Thunderwing's ball-and-socket is significantly smaller than Red Alert's and no decent fix has been forthcoming. I'm also a bit disappointed that the chest modification sticks out far enough as to impair the forward landing gear, but whatcha gonna do.
That is very, very awesome. Regarding the chest piece - I don't have Thunderwing, so I don't know how he folds up, but can you possibly carve/dremel down enough room for the new chest piece to sit in more comfortably, so you can still use the landing gear and such?
No, the chest piece folds up to cover the head. On Thunerwing himself, the front of the piece and the landing gear are almost perfectly even, meaning the few millimeters I added with the mod pushes the figure well beyond the range of the landing gear.
Using RA's legs for the chest plate was a genius idea. Regarding the work on the head, do you plan on painting the eyes red or yellow? Also, will the horns be painted silver?
I'm trying to decide what to do with the eyes. I'd like to keep the light shaft functionality, so solid colors are out. I'm going to see how painting it with clear red will do, so at the very least he may end up with purple eyes. I probably won't paint the head until I work out the ball joint, but when I do, yes, silver horns. He still looks an awful lot like Sideswipe to me, so I'll be doing all I can to fix that.
Pretty cool man! Like the idea of chopping parts of RA into a new chest for Black Shadow. Gotta agree with you, bugs me when there's a lot of repaints for figures. Truth be told, might as well call the Sun/Swipe mold the autobot version of the Seekers... at least by virtue of the fact that it's been repainted soooo many times. I made an exception for Sun/Swipe since the torso and legs make them look more than different enough.
