Dustsettles

 

I've made some real Bionicle models this year and this is one of them! His name is Dustsettles, probably, and he was built as a part of Secret Santa collaboration for lache (lache.mocs). What I received was this amazing duo of Discworld characters from Ivan Martynov. Thanks Ivan and jolly Christmas to lache!

In other words my idea was to build a new version of lache's sleek speed build MOC Smokeclears, a Zesk-faced swordman character with silver legs and blacks skirt and sort of brown vest; as a speed build MOC it had both very simple elements like the legs and some really cool bits like the vest and the simple torso build; I felt that was a fertile ground for some re-imagining. I began with the legs, going futher with the mechanical feel of the original, while keeping the two-toed feet design. I like big dished joints on Bionicles and added those to the knees, which have rather interesting joints where the shock absorbers are actually functional! The CCBS shells imitate the shapes of the original's Inika kneecaps.

The skirt is somehow less special than on lache's original, but my heavier version needed more robust sturctures; there is a vahki hip piece down there. I also added a scabbard to the sword, as I usually like my sword-wielders having one, and it creates a cool silhouette while also helping with the posing. This scabbard uses a new 1x1/1x2 inverted bracket for some SNOT, allowing the (obviously too shallow) slot made with a 1x2x2 brick. The torso was the most challenging part here, and I didn't quite achieve the simple elegance of the original, but I quite like the vest feel those brown mudguards create; the grille tiles reflect the matoran torso gears on the original (that piece was the speed build seed part, but I didn't have any here so I couldn't use them really). I would have loved to have similar ruru-2x2 round brick combo than on the original, but I needed more poseable neck and it didn't work out. So the slightly turtle-ish neck is a compromise.

 

The arms were built after the legs and have also those shock absorbed, thou they are not functional as in the legs. There was a large contrast between the upper and lower arms on the original, and I enhanced it by making the lower arms bulky and organic. The fingers were bit of challenge - standard human skeleton arm fingers would have looked too normal! Fortunately I had some skeleton legs, and with some black claws they made decent if somehat grotesque fingers. The silver pauldrons were used to balance out the silver legs. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to keep the head simple, but I filled the Zesk mask with some pieces to give him blue eyes and a lower jaw of a small tan gear; most of these fillings are not "connected" properly, but simple fixed between the mask a a ball socket inside. 

The silhouette of the character felt a bit too simple, so I gave him a sort of sashimono with a troll flag from Fantasy Era castle sets - I'm always happy to use such pieces. I also rethought the sword. Lache's original had a basic Bionicle blade from 2007, but I wanted the sword to be more convincing (most Bionicle weapons are silly). I had one cool HF standard sword in copper, probably from Ninjago, and the colour had a nice contrast with the silver legs, so I went with it. A little uruk-hai sword on the sashimono compliments it. Ths scabbard was shaped to theoretically "fit" the sword.

-Eero.