Behold the incomparable beauty of first-generation, old-school Transformers as I think they should look! Well, OK, so maybe "beauty" is too generous of a word...but I think they look better than they do in the original pictures, at least!

One of these days, I will do more of these... *sigh* In the meantime, below are the ones I've done to date. The thumbnails are of the original screen captures that I worked with. Click them to see the results of my painstaking fiddling with Photoshop. :)

This would be Jazz, one of my favorite Autobots and one of the first of this type of pic that I attempted...and hence it isn't my best or the most complicated of them. But I did this one for two reasons. One, I wanted to figure out how to do shading on something that's supposed to be black and Jazz's head is black. Two, I dig the vents on the sides of his head and I wanted to play with them. Hence, a close up of Jazzy-poo's head. Note that I stole and cloned the background of the finished pic from Wayward. Nightwind's bad and terribly unoriginal like that. ;)
This would be Megatron, the granddaddy baddy of the G1 world. Although I actually hate the character with a passion, his rather monochromatic color scheme tends to appeal to me, aesthetically. Nighty likes greyscale. So I wanted to...enhance that, I guess, plus make him look darker and more menacing than he tends to look on the cartoon. He's always drawn so bright and shiny on the cartoon. In my opinion, Megatron shouldn't be shiny and he certainly shouldn't be bright and sparkly...
This would be Wheeljack, the Jolly Engineer whom I so adore. I did this one for three reasons. One, I wanted to see if I could make his funky head look right. Two, a comment was made regarding the above Megatron pic to the effect that he looked like he was bathed in "angelic light." I figured I'd do a pic of someone more deserving of angelic light. :) Three, the person who made the above comment just happenend to be Frostbite, the ultimate Wheeljack fangirl, my soulmate, and my bestest friend in the universe. Hence, here's a solemn Wheeljack basking in angelic light.
This would be Optimus Prime, the Hero Man™ of the G1 world. I've just always liked this screen cap of him, so this is the one I picked to mutilate of him. And there are actually two versions of this pic...sort of. This one here is just him, and he ended up looking...uh, all-American. :) The other is a play on what this particular screen cap has always inspired me to think of. :) That version's in the Miscellaneous section, though. I'm not sure why it's there, but that's where it is...
Ahhhh, the Screampuff. :) My alter ego, in a sense, scary as that is. :) I did this pic for no particular reason, really. I just liked the look on The Screaming One's face. And as I was doing the pic, Screamer just kept getting darker and darker and darker...until I ended up with a Starscream who looks like he'd been skulking around in the moonlight...and then got busted by someone. But he doth look pretty cool, if'n I do say so myself... ;)