Just a lil' sketch... it'll take more time to explain it than it did to actually sketch it!

So this sketch is the result of a combination of things. Mostly, it's about drawing the live-action movie Transformers. But first, a little bit of history...

A big part of the appeal of drawing Transformers to me is to make them look as cool as possible. More specifically, cooler than their original form. Whether that's a toy or an animation model sheet. With the live-action movie characters though, it's literally impossible to make them look better than what you see on screen. The best you can hope to do is duplicate what you see. Josh Nizzi's stuff is unbelievable. Alex, Dan and Andrew blow me away with their IDWverse movie stuff. Still, it's hard to equal the original.

Shifting gears, it seems as if Hasbro is cancelling TF Animated. The show seems to be quite popular, and IMO is one of the best Transformers series in a long time. The word is Hasbro wants to focus all of it's efforts on the new live-action movie. If this is the case, I would think Hasbro would want to continue after the movie with an animated cartoon. Would they try an animated version of the movie-verse bots? How the hell would you animate those crazy designs?

Taking all of this into consideration, I thought: There's got to be a way to take the movie-verse bots, and make them more animation-friendly. Make them look true to themselves, but less complex, and a bit more stylized. And most importantly, give an artist the opportunity to make them look COOL without having to match such an insane level of design detail. So I thought I'd experiment a bit with my favorite character, JAZZ.

I tried to put together a movie-verse Jazz design that consists of:
-G1 familiarity with proportions, stature and face
-Simplified design with a bit of Animated style
-Design details originating from Movie-verse toys, rather than based on CGI. (Hey, this is a toy-based franchise after-all)

And I came up with what you see here. I think for something like this to be animated, it would have to be simplified even more, but I think it's on the right track. This could be adapted for animation, or comics. Anyway, just a bit of fun. Let me know what you think!