The Wanderer

This is the Wanderer, a planeswalker from card game Magic the Gathering. She is a mysterious individual with a habit of planeswalking from world to world slaying monsters and enemies with her decently-sized sword. She's a new and currently quite minor character, appearing only in War of the Spark expansion with 31 other planeswalkers; I do not know much about her character; but hers is a pleasant and exciting visual design, with light turquoise cape and elegant light pink dress and large brimmed hat and everything, so once I saw the first I though I just might end up building this character... Inevitable or not, here's the Wanderer.

The Wanderer appears in three card arts, so my reference material was very exact; They are the planeswalker card, the alt-art Japanese card and the signature spell card, decent common removal Wanderer's Strike. I naturally took some liberties, as I usually do. The most challenging and probably also defining aspect of the build were the colours. I have plenty of sand green, one of my favourite LEGO colours, and it worked nicely on the robe and the hat, especially with some light blue mixed in; they're flowers from my North Sea trip in May, likely from Glasgow's LEGO Store. Even pearl gold is somewhat common these days, even though it comes in rather specific variety of pieces.

The bright pink was actual challenge. I try to buy all oddly-coloured pieces from Pii Poo's used stock when I browse them, and I grab some from PaB walls when I have a chance. But I don't have many Friends sets, so my inventory consisted mostly of 1x2 plates and tiles and 1x1 round plates, reinforced with some odd slopes, plates, SNOT bricks and few more special pieces. Could be worse, honestly - there's lot you can do with a bunch of 1x2 plates - but then again, a dress with three cheese slopes and no usual curved slopes, that was tricky. In the end, I focused the interesting parts on visible places. Gothic arches (I have two) form the loose fabric at the chest. 4x4 "wide" curved slopes angled behind them add some organic, life-like shapes to the torso behind them. The hem of the dress is made with old good 1x2 plate/1x1 round plate curve technique, allowing some, if limited, organic flow. The technique forms an interesting pattern - not exactly like the pattern on card art, but not bad nevertheless. The sides of the hem are frankly quite stepped, like a on a pixelated video game character.


The robe and the hat use similar curve technique, so there are contrasts between the flowing and jagged forms. A pre-made KK2 piece is used a lone shoulder pad. It was bit unclear if the Wanderer had one or two shoulder pads - the other might be hidden behind the hair on the main card image - but I though one looked better, as part of the robe covers the other shoulder. The shoulders use usual T-bar-joint, as does the right sleeveless elbow. The left arm has a loose-fitting sleeve, so I had to compose the elbow with bright pink parts. It doesn't have very much friction, but it allows some posing, even with the big, heavy sword. A 2x2 metallic gold dish is used as a bracelet.

The Wanderer's boots are never shown completely, so that left some room for imagination. I wanted to build the character on the pose seen in the main card -descending some stairs. This was different from anything I've build before. It is also more interesting than statically standing figure, as a dress built with bright pink would have limited the dynamic poseability to zero! Thus I built the stairs, dark bley with some dark red as in the art, and made two completely different legs. The right leg is essentially a pillar; there's a joint in the ankle, but is it not really needed; a TECHNIC axle runs through the leg, supporting the build. The other joint has a double joint behind the knee armour. The armour itself is boringly square, as I didn't have any good round opinions in sand green. The boots are mostly improvised - I wanted to use sand green to balance the colours a bit - and the left leg has a joint even at the ball of the feet, forming the stepping posture.

The head is probably the most important part of the character and the Wanderer's posses an identity-hiding white hair and cool brimmed hat with feathers and everything. I though about using some large dish as a hat, but I didn't have any in good colours, and they wouldn't have been the right shape that helps hiding the face. I ended up using the aforementioned curve technique, and light blue flowers made the colours nicely fresh, even though it created a pattern not appearing on the actual art. I wanted to use a 4x4 dish in pearl gold in the top, but found out I didn't have one (at least not here). A backup option was cast-iron ornamental cart well. It diverges again from the original, but doesn't look bad. Some minifig katanas form the feathers.

I wanted to make something special with the hair, and TECHNIC figure scuba flippers were the way. Their angular shape formed the medium-lenght flatly cut hair-do well, and their thinness helped to hide the face. The face is of usual female character type, but without the minifig hand eyes to enhance to feel of anonymousness. The wind blows the locks to the right, as it flows the robe. The sword is not-that-sharp stud-thin one, with a spiky crossguard and curved black handle. I made it white, as it seems to be white-hot with power on the card arts.

Next build will be a dwarf with a twist. My fourth university year starts on Monday, so the pace might slow down a bit. But this has been a good summer, and an active one, too.

-Eero.