MOC: Toa Umbra

 Happy fifth anniversary of Klaanon to everyone! Our multi-author Bionicle-ish novel project started as a Text-based role playing game 29th of August 2010. Now, five years later, there are still more unsolved mysteries than we ever imagined!

As an anniversary creation, here's Toa Umbra (again, no relation to canon character), and he's one of the most important heroes we've got, especially lately. He's a Toa of light, with interesting balance of light and shadow powers (when a Toa of light uses his elemental energy, what is left? Is darkness just absence of light), great fighting skills and lot of experience of adventuring. He was an agent of the Order of Mata Nui, but recently left those hypocritical bastards to aid Bio-Klaani in war. He's the boss moderator, though he haven't been much in that business lately.

Like Sheelika, I hadn't built Umbra before as the creator of the character had done his own version years back. But then again I felt it my responsibility to make a MOC, as I am mostly the only "serious" builder on our community. Well, mostly, from time to time we can enjoy others build as well, like at the end of this post.

Umbra begin with the legs. I'm quite happy with them, they came out easily. The lower legs were prototypes for Purifier, but they were ultimately too normal and human-like for Purry's odd posture. the drifted around my Bionicle table for few months, until I decided to use them on Umbra and replaced the yellow pieces with keetorange ones. The rest of this was done slowly during a long period of time, until I finished if during the last two weeks.

Hewkii Mahri's Kanohi Garai was pain to work with. It looks really cool as a chest plate, with the marbled pattern and everything, but the shape isn't that easy... The "nose" tried always to block the head, and the angle of the lobe felt too steep. Fortunately it doesn't look bad on the photos, and a lot of tweaking with the neck (Which was hard to get right due to parts used on the upper torso) solved the head problem.

  The infamous color blocking was another challenge here. In the form seen here Umbra has lost most of his elemental energy due to extreme use of light powers, and his usually yellow armor has turned partly black. It's sleek color combination, but I wonder if they are too clustered around. At least replacing keetorange 1x6 tiles on the upper legs helped here a bit.

The cannon arm was fun, by the way. It is an Exo-Cannon in Klaanon, taken from Exo-Toa, so I wanted to use one of those TECHNIC cannons (I loved them as a kid, built very fragile bricks walls just to gun them down) but alone it looked too puny. So I bulked it up a bit... a lot, actually. A "hand" gun!

By the way, I put the cannon arm on the wrong and just flipped the photos on gimp. I always forget those! Goddamn asymmetrical characters.

-Eero