[Moose]

Greetings, Tfans.
What you see here is the culmination of 5 nights work, roughly 3-6 hours a night. Basically, I decided to do repaints, and I specifically set out to find 3 identical figurines that I could re-do in classic Seeker deco. I have always felt that the best kitbash or repaint I ever did was the Mazinger Chromia, so I took a trip to my local Collector Store to find some figurines that just shouted “Repaint me, please!” and what I found was the Evagelion Eva 01. I’m not going to kid you here- I know absolutely nothing about the whole New Genesis Evangelion series, since Manga has never really interested me, but I saw potential in these figures. They were relatively expensive for my budget ($40 for the lot of 3), but I also feel it was well worth it, so here’s a play by play of how I did this.


First off, I was mildly irritated because it seems all the major toy stores have totally done away with Model Kits and Testors Paints in particular, and I very much wanted to use the Testors paints. After traveling a bit, I finally found a craft store that sold them so I picked up a basic color assortment, and went to work. I also used vehicle-type spray bomb paints such as Rustoleum and Dupli-Color. First step was breaking down the entire figure as best as I could and spray-bombing the base colors for each of the seekers.

I tried getting the paint into the many crevices that were all over the figure by turning them upside down, spraying from various angles, and then giving each body roughly 24 hours to dry before adding detail. I noticed some paints dry faster than others- The Testors paint in particular took extremely long to dry.

Then I went to work on the bodies. This was done using the good old paint brush technique and masking tape to get those perfect straight lines on the wing fins down.

This was the most laborious step of the whole project for obvious reasons. Instead of using the cheap brush that comes with the Testors Paint package, I used my old brushes from college that served me well today as they did 10 years ago. I find the plasticity of the Testors brush just pushes paint instead of applying it evenly.
There were many pieces as shown in this pic:

It required a lot of patience to paint each one, and as you will see, some paints worked better than others.

THUNDERCRACKER:
I did Thundercracker first as he was always my favorite of the seekers. I used the Testors spray bomb of Metallic Blue for the base coat and then basic red and silver on he details. One of the first mistakes that actually worked in my favor was that I sprayed all of the accessories in blue, then I noticed using the pictorial spread from J.E. Alvarez’ “The Unofficial Guide To Transformers, 1980’s through 1990’s” that he had all black hands, and it was Starscream who had blue hands, so I actually did future work in accident. It eventually played out in my favor.


STARSCREAM:
Starscream was actually the easiest to do out of the three, and I think he came out pretty good, although I experienced some mistakes on him. For the base coat, I used simple Rustoleum Gray Primer, and even though it is a very matte finish compared to the other two, it still came out good, and the primer really soaked in the opaqueness of the brush paints. However, I also noticed that it took a very long time for the red to dry to the point of touch. I picked up some of the pieces after a 24 hour waiting period, and they were still somewhat un-cured, which then made spots over the body when I was gripping it with red all over my fingers. Each of the Eva 01 figures came with two head shapes- open mouth and closed mouth. To distinguish Starscream, I used the open mouth head only for him.


SKYWARP:
Skywarp proved to be the most frustrating but evocative and successful of the three. The original Eva 01 paint scheme featured a primary metallic purple, but I wanted the base coat to be more encompassing in terms of Skywarp’s original paint job from the G1 toy line, so I spray-bombed him as I did the others in a Gloss Black Automotive paint from Dupli-Color. This was a mistake because, as I learned later when painting his accessories, it is very hard to go from a dark color to a lighter color, especially when the Testors Metallic Purple brush paint is so translucent. Ultimately, I went back, spray bombed all the parts that would be colored Metallic Purple using the primer I had with Starscream. Where you see purple, there are actually 3 different coats of paint. Skywarp was a prime example of putting a little more effort into him proved to be a greater success.


Once they were all finished, I brought them out near a concrete wall in our yard to take pics (Figured it would make a decent “Cybertron-like” back-drop). Here are the collective pics of the finished products:




I hope you enjoy the end result as much as I enjoyed flexing my creative muscles. All the best.