MOC: Dwarf brothers Balin & Dwalin

 I've spend hours and hours of browsing pictures and concept art about The Hobbit movies during the passing year. It's a fantastic film (and luckily we have more to wait for) and has some incredibly cool designs. Here's couple of dwarves, Balin (fantastically portrayed by Ken Stott) and Dwalin (Badassly portrayed by Graham McTavish), old fighters and loyal friends and relatives of Thorin Oakenshield.

You may remember  Balin from the bust I made on December. I wanted to built the whole figure back then, but I thought that I wouldn't have enough dark red. But some time later I came up with an idea how to built those beautiful ornamental bits on his jacket using cheese pieces hold between 1x2x2 panels. It looked very good, so I couldn't resist building the rest of Fundin's son. The panels are Trans-black, so the cheese slopes used are normal red and DBley.
 The only movable parts are the fingers, but Balin is more of a counsellor that fighter anyways. He also has a boots with the same ski-slope motif than in his white beard. And yes, those are SW engine blocks used as the sleeves.

Dwalin was a lot harder fellow to build. He is quite of a fighter, the "Scary biker" of the dwarves, as actor Graham McTavish mentioned. I wanted to give him movable arms so I could pose him with his warhammer and axes. But the hardest part was letting go not ta the angled fur pieces on his shoulders. The battle droid arm  design was here from the start, I liked the pattern of mixed tan and dark tan pieces, but I tried couple of alternatives before this one. It's surprisingly hard to add odd-shaped angled parts to basic SYSTEM builds like this.

The weapons Dwalin uses were eather fun to build. The axes can be putted on his back.  They're quite simple, but I like their dwarven feel. the warhammer was a bit trickier one, as it has some shapes that are pretty impossible to capture with LEGO bricks, but I think I succeeded pretty well.

Dwalin's legs look quite small in these photos. Now I think I should have put them a bit further from each other, but it's also the angle of these photos which makes them look a bit odd. It's tricky to photograph these stiff SYSTEM figures with all that Bionicle stuff.

Pic for reference, taken from http://heirsofdurin.files.wordpress.com

Killing a dragon and reclaiming the lost homeland is not a job for pair of dwarves, so I promise there will be (at least one) more. More of that later. But it will have something to do with bad hearing and mixing up ravens and thrushes...

-Pate-keetongu