Baltasar Herbamare Plötz

 This is Baltasar Herbamare Plötz. He was built for a crab collab just tomorrow, but the character goes way back, maybe 6 or so years. He was my character on tabletop role playing game Shatterzone, vigorously reshaped from original shell designed partly by one Greg Farshtey. Well, anyway, Shatterzone is set in space and specifically in starship Minna Canth, piloted by drifter Jake McKorhonen with proud Ostrobothnian heredity. Baltasar (named after German baroqu architect Johann Balthasar Neuman) was the ships janitor, though he was a painter by profession (Shatterzone is realistic in a way; artists usually need another job). He solved the final conflict by painting a heroic rapper portrait of Martian biker mouse Verneri Vaderi, the story's antagonist, persuading him to be good again. More information can be found on Shatterzone Wiki.

I must confess this wasn't going to be Baltasar to start with. I was just making a crab (a pocket crab), with round shell and the eyes under it. Actually, the first shell wasn't this round, it used some angled tipper ends. They were bugger to connect, as they don't have any connection points inside! I finally replaced them with a X-pod dish, which worked much better. And the crab needed for some sort of theme... and the crab collab had many crabs, garder crabs, fortress crabs, robo crabs, but no painted crabs (I suppose) so Baltasar it was. I had to give him one big and one small pincer, as Baltasar is that sort of crab. The beret was easy, and the painting of Verneri Vaderi was fun to do. It must be noted that I made the original painting on watercolours during the game session; it's on the GM's apartment's hall wall. I know it because I saw it last Wednesday.

-Eero.