Midsummer Night

Midsummer night, buzz of nightingales and song of mosquitoes! This one is inspired by endless light of northern nights; and this is my last entry for Summer Joust 2021, the category being, of course, Creating an atmosphere. The best category! I wanted again to make a peaceful skene, something different from usual "little men in armour" type of things. But I made a castle (a rather two-dimensional though) so it's clearly a Castle model, right? Medieval to the bone.

Forced perspective is hard with large figures, because the thing on the background has, naturally, to be bigger than the thing in the foreground. With minifigs this is not much an issue, as most things are bigger than minifigs. But large figs are large and... anyway, the background is 52 modules wide. This is my second biggest model this year, after Grand Hotel Kudelma. The background also uses different scales: The spruce is naturally closer than the castle, even though they are both against the sundown and all black; slight gradient from black to green via dark green represents the hills rising towards the larger crags with the castle and the tree; there's even a gradient in the stream, reflecting the blues of the upper sky (atmosphere?) though it's not well visible on this angle. The stream supposedly goes under the bridge, as there is a lake behind it; line of dark brown marks the surface, with the water reflecting the darkest reds of the sky. And the blues of the sky, with the blue and white flowers, sandwhich the red gradient. I'm happy with the effect.

The figure has a re-imagined folk costume, drawing impressions from general aesthetics more than any actual regional specialities; there are connections to Finnish tradition, but on very shallow level. The approach was somewhat similar on my Glassblower model in 2019. With those stockings and skirt it's probably a bit modern - but this also enables more dynamic posing, capturing the atmosphere, which was the point all along! Possibilities with dancing figures came forth with YMPÄRI YMPÄRI YMPÄRI animation about an year ago. This figure is less posable; however, the asymmetrical dress was designed to allow some very specifig posing, left leg up to the side. 

I'm very happy how the hair turned out. Medium nougat works nicely as realistic hair colour, but connectors in this shade are limited. This leans to simples possible method, mostly stacking 1x2 plates. The flowers in the hair enhance the summer night feel, creating a connection to the flowerbed on the ground and adding mundanely festive effect. The baron's got a castle, but she's got the whole world.

-Eero.