He’s a true transformer

These days, Transformers are once again grabbing attention with their robotic claws, thanks to the just-released blockbuster, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.’’ But Robertson has long been doing his own brand of transforming. He’s part of a designer toy movement with roots that can be traced to Godzilla movies and Japanese children’s action TV shows. From those, the genre known as Kaiju - Japanese for “strange beast’’ - has grown for years. Kaiju toys are intricately designed monster figures made of heavy duty vinyl and embellished with protruding spikes, glowering expressions, and nearly microscopic fingernails.

Robertson customizes his creations with mechanical clusters and finishes them off with layers of paint, blending the carefully rendered detail of a fine artist with the splattered abandon of graffiti. It’s an aesthetic he dubbed “mecha-virus.’’

“It’s the idea that this mechanical thing can grow out of any part of a monster. It leaves me direction to do a lot of different things by enhancing, re-sculpting, and modifying,’’ he said on a recent afternoon in the Beacon Hill apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Maiya Kinoshita, who grew up in Osaka. They recently returned from a two-week trip to visit her parents in Japan. He spent lots of time in toy stores.

Toy makers and collectors in the Far East as well as stateside are among Robertson’s fans. Urban streetwear design circles have started paying attention, too. He’s received effusive reviews on blogs, and he’s up for the breakthrough artist of the year in the Designer Toy Awards. His work has been sold on Karmaloop.com, the locally founded streetwear company, as well as a Beacon Hill boutique and local pop-up stores. He’s had shows at the Good Life restaurant and Lot F Gallery in the Financial District, where he has a solo show in September.

He also earned the admiration of Bob Conge, the godfather of sorts of the designer toy movement. The former college art teacher and founder of Plaseebo, a designer toy shop, invited Robertson to collaborate on a limited edition series. They sold out in 24 hours.