MOC: Nori - Regal Armour

Yep, a dwarf. Nori in his Erebor regal armor, in fact. This was built as a fast relaxing little MOC between some modular buildings I got stuck with (One of them, an old light-yellow one, is almost completed though). When nothing seems to work, make a dwarf. So it goes.

This was of course inspired by Weta Workshop's last Hobbit Chronicles book, Art of War, with nice photos of dwarf armour (though sadly not dwarves wearing the armour...) that never got enough screen time on the film (and that had odd CGI lighting too that ruined the colors.) It's unfortunate as these suits are magnificent, and Nori's beautiful brown one has especially cool pauldrons built using overlapping panels. I started the MOC with them, and added on lots of black chain mail bought from LUGBULK. It has nice, shiny quality on it - very regal indeed.

Otherwise this is random mix of basic stuff and odd techniques. Robot arm pieces can be found through the MOC. I had plenty of them in reddish brown, so they ended up in chest plate, helmet and (naturally) gloves. Another interesting pattern is done used reddish brown flower plates on the skirt - LUGBULK stuff again. Even some cheese SNOT mosaic made it way to the armor.

The spear was a challenging one. Nori also has a magnificent star-shaped mace in the film, but he's not really seen with it wearing this armour, but had a spear on the ramparts scene instead. I tried to build the mace, but the eight blades were hard to make work on this scale, so I went with the spear. That wasn't easy neither, as sharp, straight angles are hard to achieve. This design is a bit too stubby and stout, but I think it's good enough and stays together surprisingly well. I sat in the sauna thinking how to built it a finally came up with this solution using 1x4 slopes and odd 90 degree lightsaber handle piece.

-Eero