Thanks, first thing I did when I opened him was swap the face, it just suits the character much more.

 

It could be shadows but it has been proven that there are discolorations on Bee. Area's like the front hood piece with the VW icon and the roof are different then his feet/front of the car. People have door panels being different shades. It is a known thing. Just like with Sideswipe. Because of the different plastics the paint was painted over.

By the way I am not against the paint. I am glad it was painted, and I'm sad Wheeljack wasn't. And personally I don't care that much about the different shades issues. (Didn't care about it on Sideswipe either) But I'm not going to deny it's there. Even if it's not that noticeable or I don't see it much on mine, I'm still not going to deny the facts when it's been proven. I personally don't have an issue with it. But it IS still an issue. It's not like it isn't there.

 

^ Right, I'm not denying mine doesn't match up 100% in bot mode just like I'm not denying my Sideswipe has paint issues. I'd still rather have them painted than not.

 

I think when cases of the paint not matching up it's more noticeable in alt-modes because all the colors being against each other. In Bot mode they could be more spread out and not as noticeable. But like you I rather have it painted even if the shades aren't perfect across the board. It doesn't really bother me and I'd be more bothered with them just being bare plastic.

 

The paint really varies. I have three. On one of them, the paint on the hood seems a perfect match, at least to the naked eye, and the bot symbol square is very close too. On another, the hood panel is notably a different shade, but it's not too bad and only obvious in certain lights. On the third, the mismatches are so bad, with the hood panel many shades brighter than the rest of the hood, that it pretty much ruins the alt mode.

The problem is that the hood panel and bot symbol are black plastic painted yellow, so with the hood panel especially, which is surrounded by yellow plastic painted yellow, it was always going to be difficult to make it match. I wonder why they used black plastic? Maybe it was a little more flexible than the yellow plastic and so better for the folding in mechanics?

 

Mine has terrible paint matching - the symbol on the top, the rear lights and the hood panel are almost orange, the front (tops of his feet) are bright yellow - it totally ruins the alt mode for me   I love the engineering but I wish the paint was better...

Attached some images - it actually looks much worse in hand than these show :/

Honestly, if there was a KO released I'd probably pick it up hoping to either be able to swap some panels for a better match or just replace it. Sadly, i can't afford to pay full whack for a second official one and risk that also being dodgy.... and I wouldn't want to sell this on to someone else.

 

My bee has some pretty obvious paint mismatching. The hood panel that tucks in underneath in bot mode is essentially orange while the rest of the hood and most of the rest of the car is yellow. Don't know how such a mismatch happens

 

I wonder is VW got pissed at the paint mismatch and that's why Hasui isn't in charge of the MP line anymore.

 

One word... primer  

 

Is this supposed to be blue? 

That would be like firing the Architect that designed a mall but because the guys painting the parking lot lines didn't paint them straight.

 

Pretty sure that the rotating symbol is yellow plastic (it is on at least one of mine), although bizarrely enough the hood panel is indeed black plastic painted yellow on both sides as you say (just checked on my scratched up MP-21). How odd.

Part of the problem is also that all the parts of Bumblebee that were transparent plastic (his chest, forearm fins and backpack) were painted with a white primer first. All the other parts were painted directly onto yellow (or black) plastic. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the rotating symbol panel which is in the middle of a big batch of paint that had a white primer underneath. They could have got around that by giving that symbol white primer too.

 

This is what happens when it takes me 7 minutes to write a reply. Ninja'd!

 

These car companies are very sensitive, you know. GM was pretty anal about not wanting a splitting hood in Binaltech Tracks. They also wanted the yellow one before the blue version.

 

I highly doubt that. For one thing, Hasui had already been reassigned before Bumble was in a painted prototype stage.

It's time people stop wildly speculating that Hasui got in trouble. He's still working at Takara and still designing Transformers. Unless someone has actual first-hand info about how TakaraTomy runs their design teams and how they decide who works on which toy designs, there's nothing solid to base all of this "Hasui was punished" nonsense.

He was moved to other projects. That happens all the time as companies allocate their resources and plan their product development cycles.

 

Amen to that, Xaxis.

 

Yep, as Bumble points out, primer is exactly the problem.   The hood panel is black, primed white, painted yellow, whereas the rest of the hood is yellow plastic painted yellow. Thus the hood panel ends up a lot brighter than the surrounding plastic on many of them.

Forgetting the mismatched yellows from which some suffer for a moment, the thing that really bothers me about MP-21 is his face. I loved it in some of the early prototype pictures, for instance these ones:



It looks pretty much perfect in all of those, really capturing the cartoon. And yet the final version didn't end up looking this good. This is mainly down to the fact that, for reasons entirely incomprehensible to me, at the last minute they rounded off his nose, turning it into an undifferentiated blob and ruining the angles it has in both the cartoon and the original prototypes. (I can understand rounding off the horns for safety reasons, but the nose?) It is also partly down to how the eyes are pretty poorly painted on most of them. So, seeing as I have three MP-21s, I figured I'd have a go at remedying these issues on one of them.

First, here's the original:



The eyes are actually painted pretty well on this one compared to many I've seen, but because the blue paint doesn't go all the way to the bottom, it makes him look as though he's got huge bags under his eyes. It also makes the eyes look narrower than they should.

So, here he is again with repainted eyes (you do have to ignore my poor painting skills, admittedly   ):



Personally, I think that makes a huge difference. To me, just by having the paint fill the eye cavities, he suddenly looks like the young and enthusiastic 'bot he's supposed to be instead of someone who's stayed awake for a week smoking pot.

I also had a go at filing the nose to make it more angular and get rid of the roundness (the modified version is on the left):



The result:





I wish my paint job wasn't so blotchy close up, but at normal distances, to the naked eye, this looks pretty good. Before and after:



In short, I really wish they hadn't messed up the face at the last minute by squishing the nose and doing a bodge-job with the paint on the eyes (some had perfect eye paint, I'm sure, but they seem to be in the minority). The smiley face sculpt was pretty much perfect before they screwed around with it. I'm fairly happy with these mods, though.

 

Nice work, Ambitron! That makes a huge difference and brings him into a much better likeness of good ol' Bumblebee.

I'd like to do that with my own, and I'd like to completely strip off the paint from his face and use something with less of a gloss than the factory paint has. I think it would help the geometry of the sculpt look better.

I only have one Bumblebee though, and I don't want to take a chance of ruining it. I wonder if anyone is selling extra faces (official, not third party alternate faces).

 

Looks great! After you sanded the nose down which paint did you use to repaint his face? Looks like a perfect match. Also which blue for the eyes?

 

Thanks! And yes, I think a more matt paint would improve it loads, too - that's another thing that looks better on the painted prototype. The gloss is just too reflective in certain lights and really exacerbates the triangular polygons at the sides of his face (not the polygonal shapes that are part of the cartoon, but the ones formed as a result of the protrusion of his lips and mouth).

For the face I just used Tamiya white mixed with the tiniest, tiniest bit of Tamiya black. You can get a near-perfect match that way. The eyes are just Tamiya sky blue mixed with white.