Hobbitsplosion Part III: Bilbo Baggins

The hobbit. The burglar. Like Gandalf, Bilbo son of Bungo of Bag End needs no introducing. Neither needs Martin Freeman, who should be known to everyone from his roles as Watson, that guy from World's End and that guy from The Office. He's Bilbo and Bilbo is one of the most loved Tolkien characters (though sometimes I feel there's not enough of this hobbit in The Hobbit films, damn Legolas, but won't talk more about that now). Bilbo felt like natural choice for the last one to be built, and despite his interesting and not-that-common color scheme I finished him in, let's say, four or something hours on the last Saturday.

Bilbo needed to be a bit more lightly built than the dwarves, so I made him 7-wide (as Ori, but he's a babyface dwarf anyway). The odd width made it possible to create three-wide olive green vest with symmetrical buttons.  The rest of the torso built itself around it. Fortunately I had bought lot of dark red slopes within some Bricklink orders and such. The sides of the torso are built mostly with 2x2 inverted slopes as I didn't have many bricks in that color; I think Dori and Balin stole all of them already.

I had some trouble with the arms, as there isn't many (if any!) dark red brick hinges. Fortunately I had spare dark red minifg legs which were quite good; I wondered I should have mod some of the dwarfs with the same trick, but their color schemes looked alright enough. I quite feel that Bilbo's arms and especially hands look a bit too big, as they are exactly the same size than the dwarves' and Gandalf's hands. I didn't have any alternative designs so I went with this for the sake of continuity.

Bilbo's legs were a pleasant deviation from the dwarves (Gandalf is legless) as he didn't have boots but his iconic hairy hobbit feet. Minifig legs create the shape of the toes. I was going with two legs sticking out on both of the feet tips, but it would have looked too much like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I was quite sure that Bilbo was not teenage, mutant or ninja, and probably neither a turtle.

The head was the last part I built, as it was beardless and therefore less interesting than the dwarf heads. It turned out rather nice in the end. Bilbo's got a dark orange hair. Medium dark nougat would probably have been better, they used it on the minifigs and everything, but I couldn't have managed to build it with my medium dark nougat collection, mostly used on Fili's hair. The hair consist of 1x2 plates (and one 2x2 corner plate) and has that nice, messy, hobbit-ty look.

Bilbo has also his elven knife Sting. I admit that it's not so authentic, but a curved, sharp and elegant piece of weaponary is rather horrendous to build with highly-developed interlocking brick system! It's round all right, like a baton, but looks alright if you don't think it too much. I probably should have added a bar inside it to fill the hole in the end. The One Ring is in the right scale for this figure, but it doesn't appear in the photos because it would make Mr. Baggins invisible!

This is the last character post of The Hobbit project. A grand big group shot post will follow, immindiately, on the top of this one. Hallelujah.

-Pate-keetongu