#flutehammer

I also recommend putting down images of existing transformers designs or characters that have the vibes or little design aspects you want/really like! Like for example here, I've put up images of Aileron because she had the sort of body type I wanted for Stargazer; I put in Tailgate because he was a small bot with big shoulders like how I envisioned Astrofire, etc etc. You can sift thru tf wiki pages, look at images of existing tf characters you know, or even look at the oc tags over here on tumblr to get inspiration!

Another thing I know I and probably a lot of other people struggle with is colors. Making up color schemes for any character is a bit of a pain when you've got no clue where to begin, and you never want to settle with a single color, it's good to break it up with a secondary one to make the design easier on the eyes!

In your case, I'd take your dad's car's color, think of a possible secondary color and plop the choices into colorhunt.co

This site's helped me a lot with trying to figure out how to make my color choices fit nicely with each other. I know I mentioned only a first and secondary, but it's also good to keep in mind extra colors for tinier parts of the design. Like for example, Firecracker's color scheme here started from me wanting to give him that classic decepticon purple and black, the orange was an addition I got from looking thru pallettes on colorhunt and I think it really made the whole design pop!

Above is his original design (left) vs his current redesign (right); he's a lot more refined now, proportions are closer to how I wanted them and I've learned a whole lot since making his first character sheet aha

These are the two main things I try to consider when designing transformers characters, actually drawing the bot yourself is a whole other challenge that I'm not really sure I'm equipped enough to tackle that well aha. One thing I can give though that's consistent throughout my process is that, I very much recommend making a rough sketch or creating a silhouette for your character before getting into the details!

But yeah, that's pretty much the main stuff, hope this helps you out even with how messily worded it is aha