MOC: Gambrodon

 It's nice to see that the big LEGO Communities and sites like The Brothers Brick and Eurobricks have paid more attention on action figure themes. Eurobricks has now an Action Figure month, and this is my entry to "Brain Attack Before and after-contest.

 Gambrodon lizards are herbivorous critter from their native planet Runksukka. They are also very popular pets in Makuhero City because of their cute appearance, playfulness of a puppy and curiosity of a five-year-old. The idea behind this lizard was to use very similar head than the mutated one's but with huge, cute eyes and blunt teeth and a lizard-like low body build. The tail is rather similar to the big one. I looked HF Brain Attack screenshots to see how the official characters mutated with the slugs: The body build altered but the head was pretty much the same.

And so, when a vicious brain slug attack and attaches itself to Gambrodon's head, it launches a very fast and nasty evolution...

 ...And turns the cute critter into terrible dinosaur.

I haven't built that much animal creatures with Bionicle/HF parts so this was an pleasant challenge. It started with the head. I had had a similar head tablescrap around for few months, and I took it and gave it more evil-looking eyes, some more teeth and built that red brain-slug. It was easier to integrate a brick-built slug into the head and I don't even have any of those official ones.

This was also a surprisingly fast build, probably around five or six hours of intensive summer day-off building. After the head I build the neck, then the legs, which needed couple of tries to get then right. I'm especially glad of those tubings, which add both robot-like feel and natural muscle-like curves. The dinosaur arm pieces on the torso are another "motif" I wanted to use to add texture.

The tail was interesting. I needed a tail heavy enough to balance the MOC, but stiff enough to keep the pose. Those two-toe feet pieces worked surprisingly well. They are connected to basic HF joint pieces with one ball on the middle. The tail can be posed, but is held together firmly enough to keep it stiff. The spikes on the tip on the tail create a connection with the shape of the head, and the red pattern on Skrall sword adds a color splash to associate with the red slug.

-Pate-keetongu