Amunna, Harbringer of Thebes

 And here's the last creation for Parts Festival 2/2019 on New Elementary. For me, it was a series of six builds put together during a six-week period, so even this model is already three or four months old. But don't worry, I've bee building since, plenty of characters, some modular buildings, few surprises... But now it's time for another challenge. MOC WARS has been going on for a week now, with three left. I haven't post anything for it yet, as I wanted to finish with NE first. But you can expect the first entry from me early next week. Until ten, this is Amunna, Harbringer of Thebes, and she was the second-last build I made; the last one was Bramante's Tempietto. As always, huge thanks to Tim and Elspeth, see you somewhere, sometime.

"This is one of the later creations to the parts fest. At this point I had used vast majority of the pieces. But I still hadn’t used the coral pieces, even though they were among the most interesting ones! I prefer colourful builds over greys, and there weren’t that many colours in the pieces, so I thought that I’d do something with the coral early on. I didn’t. I made some tests, some tablescraps, but they didn’t develop into anything much. I feel that they’d be cooler if they had more hollow studs to connect into the bars sticking to random direction; now there’s hollow studs to only two directions, and as they’re in 90-degree angle, possibilities for interesting geometries using only this piece are scarce. There aren’t many dark turquoise connector pieces to go there in between neither.

They’re still cool, unusual pieces, and dark turquoise is nice colour I’m happy to have back, even though I prefer medium azure as a shade. I sort of forces myself to use them somehow. Two can be connected to each other in sort of mirrored-by-point way that creates nice 8-looking hole in the middle. I put four of those pairs to a Travis brick in a twisted position reminding of Finnish plum jam Christmas tart (surely a comparison familiar to everyone). I though they’d work as a energy bolt magic shield used by some wizard, so I began building a magical person.

The new character build ended up being inspired by ancient Egypt tropes, probably twisted by some vague Persian influences. This mostly because I had an inkling of a head that was left for Gwathlo of Order of Morning Star, as its headdress wasn’t protective enough for a warrior. I made some hair with 1x2 round plates, used some dark turquoise on the clothes to balance the corals and incorporated a cool printed piece from Orient Expedition line to the chest. I also thought about using shepherd staff tablescraps made a month ago as some sort of gaiters. They fitted the colour scheme and Egyptian fantasy aesthetics, and I wanted to use those things somewhere! Each one has ten staves and they’re connected to simple 1x1 vertical clip plates going around. The lower leg isn’t that sturdy, as it’s one-stud-connections all the way from knee to ankle but works quite well in the end.

Another interesting technique is the skirt, even though it doesn’t use any seed parts. Big Chima feather pieces are connected to 1x2 round plates, making layered design. I’ve used similar technique before in a model named Grata of Kontrabontempi, but it used 1x2 thin liftarms instead of round plates and being thus very fragile. This is clearly an improvement. It limits the movement of legs, but has enough space inside for realistic legs, and gives the teal stomach section an interesting triangular shape.

When most of the figure was built, I returned to the original idea, coral pieces as magic bolts. It felt silly. Solid turquoise colour doesn’t feel like bolt of energy; it would have been just an unidentified thingamajig in the figure’s hand. I tried adding some transparent pieces to it, but the result looked messy. I had to use the piece somehow! I ended up using them as the part of attire as a collar of sort: Something similar is used by some British queens in famous portraits (Elizabeth I I think).  I think it’s fitting addition to the rather extravagant (in a good way) uniform and works lot better than those energy effects would have. I also built a staff, finally using golden palm leaf pieces I had waited to use somewhere for five years or so… Its stick consists only of medium azure 1x1 bricks and pearl gold 1x1 round plates. Fragile as hell, especially when being photographed in minus degrees Celsius, but looks neat."

-Eero