MOC: Sir Terry Pratchett

 I've build dozens if not hundreds human (or dwarf or something) character builds. Most of them have been fictional characters, from books or movies or comics or games. Real persons have been lot rarer. There have been some: Madventures for Finland 100 contest, Lemmy Kilmister bust as a tribute and some humppa band Eläkeläiset's members in primitive pseudo-miniland style before the time of this blog. But all of these people have been known for their physical selves: Madventures as television persons (although they have written some excellent nonfiction books) and Lemmy and Eläkeläiset as musicians, appearing on stage.

Position of book author is different. From them we have words and sentences and, well, books, bunch of letters really. But in other hand, some of the most influential persons to me are writers, and heck, they deserve as much respect as those who are more physically exposed.

Sir Terry Pratchett died of Alzheimer in 2015. Before it he wrote several dozen books, including 41 (plus tie-ins) about a world on top of four elephants that stand on the shell of an enormous star turtle. I've built 19 characters from those books, and as they formed the main part of my display on Worldcon 75 it felt essential to include a character build of the author himself.

Pterry was well known for his white beard and black hat. I began with the head here, and the beard is one of the trickiest ones so far and I've built quite a several beards. It uses cattle horns, claws and a croissant. The three "slices" are connected only on the hat and the cheese slopes on the cheeks are not connected to anything at all, but stay snugly between the pieces. It's quite an advanced head build, if you don't mind me saying... The hat brim is connected with rubber band. Wanted to try it, wasn't as easy as expected, but works alright. Hiding a joint there wouldn't have looked as good.

Sir Pratchett wears same clothes than in the author portraits in the most recent books: Leather jacket, dark blue shirt and black trousers. Regular clothes are not as easy as you might think. As there isn't any tricks to hide shapes under details and accessories, some attention must be taken on the silhouette. The angled sides are done using plate joints. The shoulders, once again, were too wide when adding the arms, and I had to narrow them two studs. I wanted plenty of movement to the arms, so I plugged a ball joint to the elbow. Brown belt and dark tan buckle add some colour to the overall dark attire.

The trousers are never easy, neither. I've written about this before, but it's hard, it really is. Make them too thin and it looks like very tight pair of legwear. Too wide looks odd, too. Too straight works neither, it's unnatural. Legs aren't just two tubes of cloth. I think these are alright, but challenging anyway, for being just so simple shape. I like the shoes though.

Terry also holds a miniature version of Discworld, with Great A'Tuin and four giant elephants (Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon, and Jerakeen - I checked them on Wikipedia, can't remember everything). The elephants consist of three parts each and I like them quite a lot. The surface of the Disc is hardly visible on the photos, but it's based on official maps, though simplified a lot. Pillar of Cori Celesti can be seen there. It was missing during Worldcon, though. One simply can lose mountain home of the gods. Forget my own head next.

-Eero