Self-Portrait as a Wooden Man

  This is my entry for Bio-Cup 2022, preliminary round, category Nature. I'm very scared. It's a high-level contest, full of breathtaking models every year. Haha. Got to have challenges, I guess. Using Bionicle parts haven't been my strong point on... past eight years, I think. I'm rusty, but there's only one way to fix it...

My entry is a wood man. He started as a Treebeard but turned out quite soon no to be him. There's something that embodies nature in a concept of Tree Man. It has us, and it has nature. Nature needs to have the counter-pool of humanity, or technology, or something, to be nature. Otherwise it is everything, and everything is too broad for a contest category. Bear this in mind when you see the fifteenth Tree Man entry on this round!

 The head was the first thing I build, and it defined a lot. Within some time I saw myself on this figure; I have bigger stomach, sure, but somehow, I had built myself into it. A wooden plastic me. The legs come second, with this relaxed, pondering stance built into them. The cog he's pondering was a very late addition: but it helped to define the model, with this basic principle of nature defined by what it is not. And it's also me, who lived first 20 years in Eastern-Finnish ex-forest, now-clear-cut wasteland, with master of science degree (though on architecture and not engineering, so no gears, but it's a nice shape and piece and works better than a wall, or even ionic capital, which is even more absent on my profession than a cog).

But it's a Bio-Cup entry, so I had to give some serious thinking to the pieces. The midsection uses Bionicle parts, albeit in quite unorthodox way. Giving the colour scheme, I think the volume of Bionicle parts is decent; the texture of brown mata torso wouldn't have improved it, and I didn't have all the brown Kanohi masks here... The volume is also balanced by how intgral the "Bonkle" parts are to this model; they keep it together. Some constraction ones ended up in the limbs to make them less blocky. I doubt I could have made it more bionicleish without sacrificing the character or the aesthetics of it, and hope it's all right. The model ended up a lot more personal than I thought it would.

-Eero.