Animooted Hilltopper concept idea...

So, I've been slowly working on a repaint idea for Animated Optimus Prime. Of course I'm going to do an Animated Kitty Truck! I've got the main concept down, but my lack of skills in Photoshop (or in my case GIMP 2.6) are keeping me from getting any more progress done on it.

As you can see in this picture, I've managed to kind of change the color scheme of the original image of Optimus Prime over to the orange & black Kitty Truck colors. My problem now is trying to figure out how to do the 'whiskers' on the truck itself...

I've got 3 options so far, whiskers based off the first toy I did, a new whisker concept that'll be unique to the Animated toy, and finally; one keeping pretty true to the original semi's paint scheme... I like all of them for various reasons. The first "Toy" whiskers would be the easiest to do from a painting standpoint, as the whiskers wouldn't have to correspond to his abdomen in Robot Mode. The second "Redline" design is something that another forum user at http://www.tfw2005.com/ proposed, since the Animated toyline is all about smooth lines; and I admit that it does look pretty slick... Finally, the final "Truck" paint scheme seems to look the best to me, as it's the closest to the actual paint scheme. I had to make sacrifices to the first repaint so I'd even be able to *do* it, so I'd be thrilled to be able to keep this as 'true' as possible...

Now all I have to do is figure out how the whiskers (well, except for the "Toy" ones) will transfer to the Animated toy model... The toy's abdomen is obviously a bit different from the animation model, as Prime's grill is quite a bit larger; giving him a 'six pack abs' look...

I've already got one Voyager Optimus to work with for the repaint, and I've actually got another coming from my Buy/Sell/Trade thread over at TFW. This time around I'm hoping to get a second one made to give as a gift to my mother, since she *REALLY* liked the first G1-based project. Heck, it was her father that drove the rig this guy's based off; and his C.B. handle is the inspiration for his name, Hilltopper!

Here's hoping he turns out well, once I actually start working on him that is!!!

:D