"This is one
of the later creations to the parts fest. At this point I had used vast
majority of the pieces. But I still hadn’t used the coral pieces, even though
they were among the most interesting ones! I prefer colourful builds over
greys, and there weren’t that many colours in the pieces, so I thought that I’d
do something with the coral early on. I didn’t. I made some tests, some
tablescraps, but they didn’t develop into anything much. I feel that they’d be
cooler if they had more hollow studs to connect into the bars sticking to
random direction; now there’s hollow studs to only two directions, and as
they’re in 90-degree angle, possibilities for interesting geometries using only
this piece are scarce. There aren’t many dark turquoise connector pieces to go
there in between neither.
They’re
still cool, unusual pieces, and dark turquoise is nice colour I’m happy to have
back, even though I prefer medium azure as a shade. I sort of forces myself to
use them somehow. Two can be connected to each other in sort of
mirrored-by-point way that creates nice 8-looking hole in the middle. I put
four of those pairs to a Travis brick in a twisted position reminding of
Finnish plum jam Christmas tart (surely a comparison familiar to everyone). I
though they’d work as a energy bolt magic shield used by some wizard, so I
began building a magical person.
The new
character build ended up being inspired by ancient Egypt tropes, probably
twisted by some vague Persian influences. This mostly because I had an inkling
of a head that was left for Gwathlo of Order of Morning Star, as its headdress
wasn’t protective enough for a warrior. I made some hair with 1x2 round plates,
used some dark turquoise on the clothes to balance the corals and incorporated
a cool printed piece from Orient Expedition line to the chest. I also thought
about using shepherd staff tablescraps made a month ago as some sort of
gaiters. They fitted the colour scheme and Egyptian fantasy aesthetics, and I
wanted to use those things somewhere! Each one has ten staves and they’re
connected to simple 1x1 vertical clip plates going around. The lower leg isn’t
that sturdy, as it’s one-stud-connections all the way from knee to ankle but
works quite well in the end.
Another
interesting technique is the skirt, even though it doesn’t use any seed parts.
Big Chima feather pieces are connected to 1x2 round plates, making layered
design. I’ve used similar technique before in a model named Grata of Kontrabontempi,
but it used 1x2 thin liftarms instead of round plates and being thus very
fragile. This is clearly an improvement. It limits the movement of legs, but
has enough space inside for realistic legs, and gives the teal stomach section
an interesting triangular shape.
When most
of the figure was built, I returned to the original idea, coral pieces as magic
bolts. It felt silly. Solid turquoise colour doesn’t feel like bolt of energy;
it would have been just an unidentified thingamajig in the figure’s hand. I
tried adding some transparent pieces to it, but the result looked messy. I had
to use the piece somehow! I ended up using them as the part of attire as a
collar of sort: Something similar is used by some British queens in famous
portraits (Elizabeth I I think). I think
it’s fitting addition to the rather extravagant (in a good way) uniform and
works lot better than those energy effects would have. I also built a staff,
finally using golden palm leaf pieces I had waited to use somewhere for five
years or so… Its stick consists only of medium azure 1x1 bricks and pearl gold
1x1 round plates. Fragile as hell, especially when being photographed in minus
degrees Celsius, but looks neat."
-Eero
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