MOC: The Samurai Stalwart

This old warrior was the first thing I built for The New Shogunate, my biggest character build diorama so far (there aren't many though). I had been wanting to build some samurais for some time, and Palikkatakomo's summer contest felt like a nice chance. Especially as I wanted to build an elderly bearded one (always a good choice) and the contest was about old  and new.

I was very happy with my Arcane Samurai from last year's May, but this time I wanted to built one with a bit larger scale to use my standard three-wide head. The beard was the starting point, as usual - the first version had silver beard that used Wolverine's claws as thin sensei-style beard, but I wanted something fuller, so I rebuilt it bigger with cool moustache. There are some similarities with Dwarven Runemaster  - the eyebrows use light bluish grey handlebar piece. I think the color difference between it and the beard works well; it keeps his appearance somewhat fierce. The sigil on the kabuto helm hides the middle part, so it doesn't look like one united eyebrow. The head is fixed, which limits the poseablity, but as he was supposed to guard the bridge like a stalwart it didn't matter.

The main idea on the armor was to use loads "Plate, modified with 2 axle holes" pieces. They're very cheap pieces with interesting pattern and I bought hundred or something few years ago for roofs. They look quite nice as plate armor (or, hahaha, plate, modified armor). They have also some nice connection points, so overall they were nice to work with.  Armor skirts like this are usually tricky, but I think I managed to make it look quite realistic; It's also surprisingly stable, given that some parts of it are connected only via bar into thin liftarm's axle hole... It limits the mobility of the upper legs almost to zero, but you can't have everything. Some dark red and pearl gold balance the colour scheme.

The upper arms use the exactly same design than the old Arcane Samurai; It's solid and sturdy design that fits easily under heavy shoulder pads but doesn't look weak on its own right. I'm particularly happy with the gloves. 3x3x3 cone always works, and the aforementioned plate modified unites the look with the armor. The boots use those pieces too, along with some kneepads done with octagonal bar frame and dark red 1x1 round tiles. The boots represent Japanese style footwear with divided toes. They were suprisingly tricky, and feature studs going to pretty much every direction, but I quite like them. The sword is another design recycled from Arcane Samurai. That creation was critized for lack of scabbard, so I made sure this warrior had one. It's quite straight for a katana sheath, but those big katanas from Ninjago sets are pretty straight, and the scabbard should fit one of them. The main ingredien is 2x16 helicopter rotor blade thing, another interesting and very cheap piece.

-Eero.