A few things I kept in mind when designing Blackout is that he is in several iterations: Uh... okay, I'll be honest, I had to do some extensive research to get a profile on Blackout's known iterations. Before the first Bay film, the name had been used in a variety of different ways, though characterizations after the first Bay verse film followed similar traits. So far, they were loyal to Megatron specifically, sneaky, can fly, determined, brutish, usually assigned to specialized teams like the Heavy Brigade or the Destruction Team, one iteration was even in a combiner pair with their seemingly identical sibling. Not going to lie, that's kind of giving me an idea. 

When it came to his vehicle, I made Blackout a dark blue combination of his Bayverse's counterparts Sikorski MH-53 Pave Low helicopter and a UH-60 Blackhawk. The larger, bulkier size of the overall body has more in common with the Pave Low, but its parts such as the cockpit, number of rotor blades, side doors, as well as the wings and their accompanying machine guns, take closer inspiration from the Blackhawk. There's also a star on his side doors. This was meant to be a vague military symbol in reference to his attack on the military base in Qatar using the form of one of their own aircrafts. Though it has been brought to my attention that it looks more like the NFL football team's Dallas Cowboys logo. Now I can't unsee it. It even has a similar color. I don't even watch that much football. How did this happen? 

The choice in the dark blue color was meant to combine the two prominent colors from his G1 counterparts, blue and gray. I also added this bit of dark green on the beak in reference to his green face on his G1 counterpart. When it came to his body, I wanted to keep his Bayverese counterparts' huge and bulky body while also taking into account that since his alt is an aircraft, parts of his body would take inspiration from avians like Starscream's parts, but would be larger and heavy set variations of those parts to account for his larger size. The split front end of the helicopter would take up his chest like in his Bayverse's iteration with the space between sporting the Decepticon insignia. The side doors would take up the shoulder armor. The wings would take up the forearms forming panled forearm armor similar to Starcreams. And the pair of machine guns attached to the wings would be stored within these parts. The helicopter blades would actually form these arm blades on the side, kind of like those things on the side of the arms of characters such as Batman, Spider-Man 2099, the New Goblin, etc. This part of the body was meant to make Blackout seem more bird-like by simulating the structure of bird wings. 

Speaking of birdlike, I gave Blackout digit degrade legs like Starscream, but with a thicker structure instead to support the heavier body. The section under the rotor would be used to form the back and would shift into a mechanism used for hovering in robot mode. When creating the head for Blackout, I tapped into the bird-like roots of the rest of his design and decided to make his head very birdlike. Combined with the form of a pilot's helmet, the overall shape of the head takes heavy inspiration from Star Fox's Falco. Given the original G1 Blackout has a cone head, I changed it up to form similar to Falco's head shape. The design of the face mainly takes inspiration from pilot helmets with the visor where you can see the sharp eyes peering through them and the beak was meant to simulate the oxygen mask. A setup similar to Vulture's mask from Spider-Man Homecoming and that one post credit scene from Morbius.