MOC: The New Shogunate

This has been the most unactive summer of Cyclopic Bricks so far - sorry. It's not that I wouldn't have time, inspiration, or bricks. I have all of those, and lots of them, too. It just seems to be that these projects get bigger than they used to, and as I don't really like to post WIP shots (they would just spoil you), time between posts gets larger. Like this one: For years people said, hey, cool figures, make so scenery for them, and I though, hell, that'd be great, but as my figures are more than 30 cm tall (one foot for odd measurement people), the scenery would be large and take lot of time and bricks (and inspiration). Well, it's summer, and my vacation is four months long, so here we go... The Samurai Bridge, or as I call it, The New Shogunate: Showdown between two members of warrior class of feudal Japan. This one is for my LUG Palikkatakomo's summer contest, with interesting subject of "The old meets the new". Samurai of this new rule has come to challenge the last warrior of the old shogunate.

There were several starting points here. I had wanted to build an old, bearded samurai for some time, so I did; there was, however, a problem: The figure was 30 centimeters tall and that meant a large scene for two of these figures. The nature of the encounter was not yet clear. Probably there would be a novice learning from his master, or a training challenge - but I ended up with a real fight, with masked warrior in a bit more modern suit of armor trying to cross a bridge.

The bridge was a tricky thing to build. I wanted one of the samurais stand on it, so it had to be quite sturdy. The design itself is quite close to real Japanese garden bridges. They're usually black or not painted at all, but as I quite like to add some bright colours to my creations, I went with red. The supports took almost all of my 1xX red plates. Fortunately I had recently acquired lot of 1x8 tiles in red and they helped to create a clean, studless look. The ends of the bridge are sturdily connected to the very base with some TECHNIC, which then again is hidden inside the mossed ground. There is naturally lot of rainbow warrior stuff going on inside the base - the water used almost all of my thin blue bricks and everything turns into mess of yellow, orange, lime green and medium lavender under the banks. The main ingredients of the shoreline, 2x3 slopes in olive green, are from LUG event reward packages. There are probably 100 of them here.

After (almost) finishing the younger warrior I returned to work with the bridge. The cherry blossom bush (that would be a tree if I had LUGBULKed more than 50 of those leaves per colour) was always going to be there, and I had fun building those shrines. The ones on the "New Shogunate" side are less mossy, and have Buddhist style using microfigs on the bases. The one on the old side in somewhat angled and covered in moss. That side also uses light bley plates and wedge plates to represent "white" gravel essential on Buddhist gardens, while the new side features stairs of stone.

The measurements of this model are 94x26 studs, just to fit my shelves - it would be painful to be forced to keep this on table, as there isn't too much table space on my apartment. Photographing this was interesting too. I first took photos with white background, but as they were almost impossible to photoshop decently with my skills, I constructed a studio in my balcony using two of my black "wooden" (MDF) tables and my white kitchen table; The other black one was used as the backdrop, supported by the white one. It looked alright but as the model is so long I couldn't take shots on every angle, so there is only six photos. I'll take and upload photos of both samurais and add them as separate posts later on.

-Eero