Virva Staccato

Hello everyone, it has been summer for a good while now. I haven't been that active here, but no fears - I've been building anyway and there are plenty of upcoming content. I also happened to graduate as an architect in May, so hi ho hey, you can call me architect Okkonen now.

 

 This model was built for a specific reason - it accompanies my recently published review of 41449 Andrea's Family House on New Elementary. The set has bright colours and a music subtheme and they guided me to build a musician to accompany Zinnia Superfuzz and Doreen Inverardi. This also meant that the scale had be quite large - these musical figures are taller than my usual ones. Drummer was an obvious choice: I wanted to use 9x9 dishes as cymbals now that I had several in pearl gold, and a drum kit made it easier to use house-based parts from the set. And, of course, the band needed a drummer.

 

New Elementary is a part-spesialising site, so the model uses several of the more interesting pieces in the set. The first idea was those sunglasses. They use transparent brown opal/satin trans-black window glasses, connected with lever bases. The effect is surprisingly cool! The arms of the spectacles are rather weird, as they blend with the hair, but more logical appliances didn't work. I think the 45 degree angle of the glasses fits well the snazzy aesthetics of this character. Other pieces from the set include the stickered magenta 2x4 tiles as the collar and the long macaroni tiles on the belt; the colours are based heavily on the set, and the walls and the columns of the house got new life on the bass drum! 

I've built a set of drums before. They were Tomi Leppänen's drums on my Circle project, and were based on a real-life kit. This one is a figment of my imagination, and not completely realistic: the cymbals are same size, for example. The bass drum construction uses the usual "round tower" technique of 1x2 bricks and 1x1 round bricks. Dark turquoise and light aqua are from the set's colours scheme, but I had to add vibrant coral as it was the only colour I had enough 1x1 quarter tiles to fill the macaroni tiles! I really like the pattern though, as well as the "mess" of metal tubes and their contrast with the bright, cool apparel of the figure. I omitted the drum mics as they didn't feel that essential, and would have taken lot of precious, useful pieces! 

 The model has also some results of my 4,3 kg wheel haul from the spring. The divided hair uses some balloon tires, and refers to microdoll Liz's hairpiece in the set. The other ends of the larger tyres are inverted to fit the smaller tire half in snugly, and the rubber bands work as (rather thin) bobbles. Large, cool 90s hubs are also used as the floor tom; their shaping is beautiful!

Next up more historical models - the deadline of Summer Joust is already closing in!

-Eero.