The Teeth of Flagrant Pass

 New year, new trimester, new intensive course of urban planning for Bachelor's degree and new MOCs to public. Well, with new I mean it's mostly built in September and finished in early December. This character, a robber baroness called the Teeth of Flagrant Pass, is a LUGBULK experimental creation. Other build of this subtype include Dwarvish Dragonguard from 2016. Here from LUGBULK are the numerous macaroni tube pieces, already seen on SOAR-SWIFT IV, bar-on-1x1 round plates on elbow and ankle joints and several connection points (for example, hip and shoulder armour and kneecap spikes). Lot of black baby bows are from the order, too.

The main idea was just a sleek black armour with a skirt made of macaroni bricks. It was monochrome black at first, but white, tooth-like barbs were added later for contrast and menace. The shoulder armour was almost samurai-like, but the entirety was more inspired by some angel and vampire armours for Magic the Gathering's Innistrad art and it's Gothic fantasy motifs.

the work began with the upper legs, which are the usual current standard variant, and the torso, which interesting, almost octopus-like chest armour is almost hidden. The waistline is quite low, which emphasizes the upper body muscles; the armour is shaped to be very thigh-fitting. I'm very happy how the hip armour completely hides the joints while still retaining some mobility to the hip joint. It's connected via 1x1 round plate with bar on side, which is located just behind the black nexo-shield. The shoulder armour is connected to a ball joint in the end of that same piece, and the ball joint connects to 1x2 plate modified with two vertical clips; old and fairly weak connection but mobile and comes in larger variety in colours that the colour-blocked bley mixel sockets. The shoulder pads have plenty of mobility and don't limit the upper arm posing barely at all. The help to define the silhouette of the character, while the white barbs balance the contrasts with the ones on the hips.

The arms are quite regular, and the lower arms are close to those on RADIANT-EXERT IV. The new tricks are used on the elbow joint, which is asymmetrical and uses the aforementioned round-plate-bar-piece. Basically the movement is those pieces spinning on their studs and antistuds. It works alright on elbow, if the character don't have too heavy things at hand, but it was far too weak to knee, where it was replaced by traditional symmetrical TECHNIC hole on stud joint. It's bit of a bummer, as the long bar is a nice way to connect further, and bars with TECHNIC holes on sides don't really exist, except for the odd but useful two-hole variant, the flick-fire-missile launcher.

The legs underwent a change on the knees, but the ankles were tricky too. Usually such bits are done using ball joints, but as small sockets don't exist in black and large ones would have been too blocky, I tried a different approach: enough rotating joints to make the movement ball-joint-like. So the lowermost joint dips forward, a jarvis between the plates, and the next one goes round horizontal, the 3x3 dish on jarvis's antistud, and the third one dips to sides, the aforementioned round plate in bar (thank gods for its round shape, makes it so much versatile). And therefore the legs can be spread a little for more lively stances and the feet don't look unnatural.

I wanted to make a large helmet that covers most of the head; the green eyes add a bit of colour to otherwise quite monochromatic composition. There is no hair visible, for a change; but there are some headdress gadget, a pair of bat wings and sort of locks with horns on the ends to add another shapes of white. They modify the silhouette a bit, along with the Piraka feet on the back; they were the final addition, actually put there along with the lantern couple of months after rest of the build was finished. They are sort of a reference to much older build, a warrior called Gortrund. A matching sword was made using a dragon or bat wing as the blade - it looks nicely menacing and fittingly bit ridiculous. The bat cross on the pommel is an old trick by Moko, taken from his Brickshelf gallery ten years earlier.

The next two build will be very old projects finished after our moving to get rids of some WIPs. But there are couple of other finished build too, and several under construction.

-Eero.