Gwathlo of the Order of Morning Star

The three final character builds were posted on New Elementary recently, and on their behalf, Parts Festival II of 2019 has been finished. This is the first of the three, based on headless bat parts and some pieces bought from LEGO House's Pick-A-Brick. Longer version of the text written for NE is here too, along with plenty of pictures. As always, huge thanks to Tim and Elspeth for asking me to participate. They're cool parts. 

"At the beginning of the Parts Festival I made several tablescraps using headless bat pieces. The most interesting was one that connected six bats to a Travis brick; of course, when confronting new pieces, one tries to stick as many as possible into a Travis. The bat has a pin instead of head – to connect a minidoll vampire head on – but a Travis has hollow studs on only five of the six sides, as one has the antistud. How to connect the final one? Fortunately, this wasn’t a problem, as it is held securely between wings of two bats on its side. The result is a somewhat dangerous looking dark blue sphere. In minifig scale, it reminded me of those iron framework balls found in churches (at least in Finland), used to hold candles. It also looked like sort of an elaborate tank blockade.

I’m foremostly a character builder, so I thought about the bat-ball in other scales too. It was a dangerous-looking object, so it ended up being a brutal medieval weapon, an end of spiked mace or a morning star. I settled on the latter, as it felt more dynamic and made it possible to use the three I had parts for in the same use. Dark blue also defined the colour scheme for the model – I had got some 1x2 cut-out slopes in dark blue from LEGO House PaB and my reserves of dark blue curved slopes looked pretty substantial. I first though of using some silver parts from Batman greeble bags as armour details but ended up using pearl gold instead. I got those rounded 1x1 plate modified with handle parts from the aforementioned PaB and used them to make a rather interesting chest plate with ridges, and dark blue worked beautifully with the pearl gold. I didn’t want to mess it with flat silver.

The wielder of the bat mace turned to be a female knight in full armour, probably inspired by the latest Magic the Gathering set with heavy Arthurian themes. I used some polygonal Nexo Knight pieces I had wanted to use for a while. They’re used in knight-themed setting before and formed cool suit of armour. I managed to make a bulky skirt to go with the chest plate; the result looks a bit like more feminine version of Kili’s regal dwarven armour barely seen on the last and rather mediocre The Hobbit film. Pearl gold upper leg armour makes a nice contrast with the dark blue skirt; its 1x2 “fin” slopes are again from AFOL Day PaB. The legs are again bit of a compromise because of the heavy skirt, but at least they’re correct length; though under the skirt they’re only TECHNIC axles stuck into ball sockets. The movement of the legs is limited, but I believe this is the case in real-life full suits of armour too.

The knees have full articulation. I like the bulkiness 4x4 dishes give to it – those pieces seem to be surprisingly common. Under the knee there’s some detail, using new leaf pieces in pearl gold. The shoes went through some versions, some heavier, some lighter. I like using 1x3x2 “inverted arch” pieces on shoes. The arms, in other hand, are very basic and quite plain. I’m not the biggest fan of battle droid arm fingers, but when skeleton arms are not a choice, there tends to be some compromising. 

The head was among the last parts to be made. I wanted to use dark tan in sake of diversity, so the jaw consists of 1x2 double cheese slopes and a 1x1 plate. The first version of the helmet was more open, as it’s quite hard to fit a helmet around my usual stylised “elegant” head design. I made a rather nice headdress motif, but it didn’t fit the model. It looked too light; I wanted something actually useful in the battle. So I reserved the first head version for some future project and made an another dark tan head; by changing the cheek parts into cheese slopes I made it possible to use 1x2 brick hinges to angle the cheek guards over the face without covering it. Golden leaf is used again as a detail and sort of a nose guard, only if there was a nose... I also slapped some shepherd staves into the helmet to act as a vibrant, medium azure plume. At that moment I thought they were one of the hardest parts to use in the Parts Festival, but I’ve already used them in three builds… One of them connects to the helmet and the others are held by the tire.

And, finally, one of the more interesting facts about this build is that it was completed in one day, save the tablescrap bat balls that were made earlier. It was a nice exam week day with not much to do, I began in the morning and finished around midnight. Great times."

-Eero