B00 Clay Prototype
The first major step towards what would become the final version was this clay prototype I made from Sculpey modeling clay and a few styrene bits. I drew all over the parts because I wanted to get an idea where I needed to cut them and where I would need to scribe panel lines and other details. There was a time when I was thinking about using ball joints in the wings where they attach to the main body. That's why there's circles drawn on the wings. They represent where the ball joints would have gone had I engineered them in. Zob picked up on the circles and I think he thought they were supposed to represent panel lines because he drew them into the final character art! I thought it was funny that unlike other convention exclusives where the head is the remolded part, Cybcon Bumblebee's face is copied from the original. It's the anti-exclusive. I didn't figure out what I was going to do for the hands until after I saw Zob's preliminary artwork, so in these early pictures they're just prizm shaped blocks.
Project Origins-Here's a really long essay I wrote about how the project came to be and what I was thinking as it all came together.
Picture Gallery 1-Early Prototypes-My first failed attempts are shown here. These are the early prototypes I made back in August of 2002 when I tried to make a cybertronian Bumlebee out of styrene and existing Bumblebee toys. I scrapped these when I changed my approach and decided to engineer the toy myself from scratch.
Picture Gallery 3-B01 Test Shot-B01 was the name I gave to the resin test shot of the clay master sculpt. Once I made this I further refined the shape and then made the final molds from it.
Picture Gallery 4-B02 Production Models-Here's when I cast the final 30 units and took them from raw resin to fully painted, fully assembled figures.