12/28/2019 - Been making a lot of progress. Now designing my own heads, weapons, and armor parts. So far, it's going very well. Slow-going which is holding up the next issue a lot. Currently, focusing on characters that are going to be in the next issue. The results speak for themselves, it's awesome how they're much more recognizable now.  Planning to redo ones like Sixshot and Overlord just because of the challenge.  Tresob's (on Shapeways) designs are awesome but wanting to have as much mine as possible.  Also reduces the amount of credits to list what is and isn't mine.  


3/25/2019 - My custom Kreons have taken a very different direction recently. I had been getting Shapeways add-ons designed by others but it's expensive and not a lot of what I was looking for. But this helped get me back into things and eventually encouraged me to start designing my own items (and eventually selling). I plan to make the Terrorcons G1 and my test to see how it'll work is with Blot (coming in my next order).  Like with Nightbeat and Chromedome, I painted the entire figure so I can use poorly colored Kreon parts.

About Custom Transformer Kreons (aka me blah blah blahing)

I had seen a custom Kreon Omega Supreme or two on Shapeways. The price was too high, you had to paint it yourself. It was impressive but this was before I was decent at painting customs. So using Kreon parts and LEGO Digital Designer, I decided to make my own. I didn't stop there, Sky Lynx was also missing so I made him too. Then Monstructor, Metroplex, and Trypticon. These all were combinations of 3rd party (kreon or ionix) and LEGO parts so kinda pricey.

After seeing a lot of clearance items I could use, I got the idea to "mass" produce these and got started with that. I could make and sell them for cheaper than I paid and still make a little money. This fell apart when Hasbro discontinued the Kreons. Lol. My business idea was a fail. I changed gears and just started making stuff for myself but making multiples and sell those. This allowed me to reduce the shipping per item. It's also not much more effort with Bricklink and multiples are nicer and sellers VS just 1 of each part.

This is also why I won't be re-releasing older items (particularly larger, pricier items). It takes a bit of time, effort, money to get everything together. Since it's a marketplace, most sellers won't have all the parts I need for a decent price, plus I can't just repeat an order, have to start over again. Moving forward, once my initial designs are done and tested, I'm going to start selling them on Shapeways.com. This plan will allow me to share and just enjoy the hobby and not have any overhead like before. Shapeways items are cheaper when grouped together (attached, physically) so when I have multiple items, I'll be making custom groupings to help keep costs down.

They've evolved quite a bit and have been improved since starting this (and still are). The biggest changes were when I stopped relying on 3rd party parts for the base and use all LEGO.
Example: Metroplex 1.0 VS Metroplex 2.0 - VERY different. Omega Supreme (he always looked good), Sky Lynx too, etc...