Back in late 2018, Hasbro started releasing toys for the first part of their WAR FOR CYBERTRON toyline, SIEGE. I saw Hound and at the store, and basically immediately fell in love with his robot mode. The following paycheck, I picked up his fellow Autobot, Sideswipe.
Now, I’ve talked about Transformers Generation 2 at least twice before, so I won’t get too into it, but the short version is that in 1993, Hasbro re-released a lot of the original Transformers toys, and some of them in funky early 90s color schemes. Sideswipe was one of them:
The major difference was an inverting of the black and red deco, but also that neon green is so damn loud that it really stands out. So I thought, heyyyy, I’m gonna do that, but I’m gonna keep him all grimed up like the SIEGE toys.
I did my best to approximate the loud-ass neon green, but couldn’t quite get it as bright as Hasbro’s printed decals. So instead, I covered all the green bits with a layer of glow-in-the-dark paint.
His red bits were painted first in a darker, brick red color, and then gone over with a watered down brighter red. I intentionally painted over his hood with some extra black to get those brush lines; SIEGE takes place during the war on Cybertron, and I really wanted to make it look like Sideswipe had seen some shit.
Of course, like, six months later, Hasbro ended up releasing the G2-style Sideswipe as an online exclusive. And since then, they’ve used this mold for Red Alert, Deep Cover (twice), and Tigertrack — Which means you can basically make a team of Sideswipe redeco Power Rangers (if those rangers are red, black, white, blue, and yellow).
Anyhow, this guy was pretty fun to make, even if the way I made him means he’s paintlocked and can’t convert back into Cybertronian car mode.
Sideswipe, Transformers, and all related characters and concepts are owned by Hasbro.