Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully the Brown (3)

My newest Mustrum Ridcully model debuted in Inadvisedly Applied Billiard scene, but here's a whole post about the figure itself! Sir Terry Pratchett's books are so full of life-like characters, and I have to push myself constantly to new limits to achieve this. The new Ridcully had to be able to play billiard, and I also wanted him to be able to go fly fishing, and to have... facial expression (new frontier of character building)! The old version was constantly surprised.

My recent Rincewind model was the prototype here, and Ridcully developed its technique - two tan 1x1 round plates with bar, two tan minifig hands, and some darked minfig arms for eyebrows. Eyebrows are such important in facial expression. While Rincewind's expression could limit to scared and worried looks, I wanted Archchancellor to be able to look puzzled, unimpressed, surprised and determined; thus the connection for adjustable eyebrows had to be flower. The bar-piece thingies are stuck between the eye headlight bricks with rather complicated and exquisite SNOT work; the tooth plate of nose covers most of it. I was not afraid that those minifig hands would look messy, as they are shadowed by the hat and hell, Mustrum should have some wrinkles!

The poseability is not limited to the eyebrows. Ridcully had double neck joint (via Mixel 1x2 plate with socket and ball), which meant I had to re-design the beard so it would enable moving the head. I also enlarged the beard - it it practically two plates thick with some wings for detail. The "flap" of the beard also fortunately hides the neck joint! The poseability of the head is not very wide, but does the trick. Small tilt of head gives lot of personality, too! I'm also rather happy with the new-ish mudguard as the moustache. The hat is mostly recycled from the old version, plus I added some artificial flys; and changed the X-Pod half from the top to bottom one!

The arms are standard issue, with a bit too loose elbows. The legs are not much special neither, but I was happy to be able to use barrels as inside-out boot legs again! With posing in these pictures, even the stud-into-pin-hole knee joints were too loose, and I had to change the pieces for minimal additional stability; oh well. On the more interesting aspects, I'm happy with the coat. It uses large arch bows, connected with mixel joints to achieve natural angle. This gives enough room inside for the hip joints, also hiding the most severe parts of them. 

The staff (which, knob removed, works as the cue) and the crossbow (slightly updated) are taken from the old model. The new accessory (aside the billiard table, of course) is the fly fishing rod that comes with Ankhian River Catfish for some action shots! Ankh fish have no teeth, and work somewhat like vacuum cleaners, so a catfish was a good start. The water surface is fittingly brown (or dark tan) after flowing through the Sto Plains and the city. There's a splash of trans-clear bubble cockpits, though - I bricklinked those for cheap some months ago, and finally got to use them here! The fish with base had to be heavy enough to tighten the line and give the rod a slight curve, and I managed to capture that. Maybe I'll build a whole scene of this one day. I made one in Miniland scale already, after all.

-Eero