Back with more Decepticon girls! The hardest part about these designs is working with the extremely limited color palettes of the original.
Soundwave was difficult to conceptualize because the original character design is so intrinsically based on what he IS. I was originally going for a wigger rapper look to go with the whole boom box thing and turned his helmet into a snapback, but the look just didn’t really work for me. I also really wanted to do the animal carrier thing, because the fact that Soundwave stores tapes in his chest is one of the most important parts of his design. But when I realized that the stripes on his chest reminded me of a marching band uniform, the idea to design her like a drum major just clicked into place. Yeah the whole animal thing kinda gets ditched but I think the drum major idea just works really well as an ”adaptation” of his role as the Decepticon’s no-nonsense communications officer. The trumpet is a vague reference to his normal gun, I’m thinking something like a
marching tuba might work for the shoulder cannon. Looking back on it now, I’m probably gonna slut her up by changing the T-shirt to a tube top (e.g. just the “tape window” part), it’ll also have the effect of breaking up the color balance a bit.
Shockwave was where the whole idea for this “project” started, because of
this meme. I immediately knew how I wanted to adapt that distinctly non-human head, with the hexagon-shaped hair obscuring one eye. The rest of her design is simple because the original design is pretty much a purple blob outside of his two defining traits, being his head and his chest.
Trying out a new, less refined style using a pencil instead of a hard brush for line art and RIDICULOUSLY simple shading in order to shit out a colored sketch as fast as possible, because I plan on drawing more of these girls and couldn’t put as much time into each one. Pencil is a lot more forgiving, and I’m using just two layers for crudely painted and layer-blended highlights and shadows for the soft shading, so I was able to crank out the Soundwave-girl in about 3-4 hours while playing D&D, compared to the 10-15 I spent on Megatron-girl.

