Bea on the Beach

 This was my third and last MOC for New Elementary's Cloth Festival. It actually bends the theme a bit, as the pieces in limelight are not textiles but "Plastic" according to their Bricklink taxonomy. However, the Plastic category pieces behave similarly to cloth parts, so including them felt appropriate. There is a cloth piece here too, the blanket - but it's not connected to anything.

As Suon Suncaller was clearly a winter-themed character, I wanted to make a very summery person for balance. It called for a beach setting, and the sail parts (the set has only one) from 41317 Sunshine Catamaran were perfect for that. They're used as a beach skirt, and combining two sails in different position results a nice swirly star-like pattern in the middle. The sail parts again defined the colour of the MOC, though I dropped the white in favour of more bright colour: Medium azure, magenta and trans-yellow for the hair.

As the sail parts are large, 23 x 26, the MOC is larger than the two previous Cloth Fest characters; I call this scale rock'n'roll scale. This is the first time I've built bare legs in this scale, and there is an interesting bit of mould variation utilised here. The ankles use 1x2x3 slopes in tan with hollow, open studs, so a bar with small ball joint can go through, making a clean ankle joint with Mixel ball socket. This can be only done with the oldest (and least common) version of this part, but it's relatively stable.

The hair is made of stacked 1x2 plates, a technique I've used many times. I think the transparent plastic with the stud pattern has some tincture and variation akin to real hair. One must be careful with this technique, though - Bea had originally trans-blue earrings, and the gave the hair unpleasant green tint! The hair is topped with a big magenta hat, as hats are cool and they create nice posing options!

 In addition to the clothes, I packed in the MOC some extra beach gear; a box of picnic, a refreshing drick, beach-almost-ball, an ice cream cone (must-have!) and a crab. The crab is a reference to those crab collabs cool people do. The crab befriends Bea in the end.

-Eero.