2023-06-03
Seize the Night
2023-05-20
Palutena's new hair!
This is a shorter post for a weekend, as the subject is just an addition to an older model. I built another Palutena (with Wario and some scenery) for my LUG's contest in April 2022, but wasn't quite happy with her hair. It wasn't an easy case - the hair should be long, which means heavy, but also able to hang from the back of the head (as usually...) and the head should be poseable, with a ball joint keeping it upright. And green isn't the most widely available colour in my collection. Well, actually, Palutena's bangs and other "head-hair" here are bright green, as some parts in it were just perfect.. but I had no means for making the long flock bright green, and thus it was green - and a bit puny...
Jump to this spring. I was taking part to New Elementary's Flowerfest, and was making own models with Dried Flower Centerpiece and Daffodils. I had plenty of ideas for the dried flower parts (one build out here, two still incoming - but naturally published on New Elementary) but was struck black with the daffodils. Then I realised, hey - that's plenty of neat dynamic and light green pieces, the large fin pieces with female click joints! They felt excellent for this use. The only bugger was there weren't any green connectors with male click joints, at least not in my collection; the set uses sand green ones for unknown reasons. This made angling the pieces naturally challenging, but I think I nailed it just fine. One of the fins is connected with a mixel ball joint, but I even managed to hide the grey connector pretty well.
-Eero.
2023-05-09
Greta Ericales + Exhibition
But in the end, something on this character didn't work; for starters, it was very hard to keep intact. Now, I've made a lot of fragile models in the past, but I've been getting better at sturdiness; but this was a painstaking one. There were problems with the skirt/waist connection, the coattails dropped off, and most importantly, the head was a mess, all the time. There's something troublesome with the jaw consisting of two 1x2 cheese slopes, connected with their back studs only; they wobble, get misaligned and drop off all the time. But 1x2 double slope (nor any of its variants) isn't available in dark tan (nor, for example, in medium nougat). For the sake of diversity I wish they'd release those parts; or maybe is should just gid gud in making those faces. Sight.
Greta Ericales has already been demolished, but I displayed it at Pii Poo's event in Turku of Finland three weeks ago. I'm also currently having a new exhibition in Messukylä library, Tampere - titled Osa-alue - until 29th of May. Check it out! I'm quite happy with how I was able to set the display with very limited array of furniture and a rather weirdly-designed (but big) glass cabinet.
2023-03-18
Helia Manning
More music-themed builds for 2023! This one continues my "rock'n'roll" scale band member series. She's a singer, so no instruments here; but for sake of posing I added a microphone tripod... and a huge amplifier, inspired by Ralf Langer's Open Air 2053. I wanted to explore how to capture the lifelike and lively stances of a singer, so the figure had to be relative sturdy and flexible. Of course, not having a heavy instrument makes the posing easier.
I had had that dress hem doodle on a tabel for a while, and almost parted it out before realizing it could work here. This character itself started with the sfootwear - black leather boots or military shoes with heavy-duty sole profile and silver buckles. I wanted to something entirely different from the dainty high heels of Lydia Frenckell, the previous character of this series. However, I did not want this character to be overall heavy metal esque - I wanted to to create a contrast between these heavy and more feminine elements of the attire. So to continue upwards from the boots I grabbed the dress hem tablescrap, added the flower belt and made a matching bright light orange bodice (which took plenty of adjustments during the whole process). I'm particularly happy with the magenta dot pattern below the neckline.
Again, the fingerless gloves match the boots, using skeleton warrior -themed minifig chestplates. I've had a small collection of those armour parts around for new uses for years, but haven't managed to use them that often (okay, Lydia's aforementioned shoes had a pair). Their shape is such nice. It's also nice to see that we've got enough reddish brown parts for arm joints now - no black pieces needed! Who would have known ten years ago?
The head and the hair call back to Virva Staccato, the third character of this series - but this time it uses one big balloon tire. This is an older tire from late 90s or early 00s, and it is somehow more round than the newer balloon tires; I actually experimented with a newer and bigger tire, but it wasn't that good; probably due to the profile being larger, it didn't look like fluffy hair. This one stays in place nicely, and actually helps the head to stay in one piece: if the head falls off (as it sometimes does due to being heavy) it tends to hit the floor hair first and bounce a couple of times harmlessly. The zipline braid holding the hair up was suggested by the clever folk on EPLUG - thanks! It works well.
The microphone stand is a simple affair. I made it silver-grey to make it shand out from the black amplifier and the black gloves; candle pieces are of good diameter for this scale. I tried a non-Lego sewing string for the cord, but it wasn't too thick. Now the cord is a bit short, but has enough thickness to look convincing. I think its curve and flow adds some important authenticity to the whole. The amplifier was designed around those big balloon tires turned inside-out, and the red and yellow 6x6 dishes were a late swap to make it fit the colourful aesthetics of the group. The amp has been designed to work both horizonally and vertically - hence it's quite smooth and without visible knobs and switches.-Eero.
2023-03-09
Richard Dawson
In the past-time, the real Circle band went through changes: they intoduced a new member, UK citizen and folk singer-songwriter Richard Dawson, who had made several acclaimed albums and already featured on one Janne Westerlund's solo album. Dawson made a debut in live line-up in 2019 and during the pandemic they published a small-issue improvisational free-form cassette Hymiö. The grand double-LP Henki, featuring songs about plants (lyrics and lead vocals by Dawson), was released in November 2021 and got a wide publicity (for a Circle album). The toured Europe and had some gigs in Finland - I saw them in Manse Psych Fest in my hometown, Manchester of Finland. Instead of rivets, spikes and colourful spandexes featured on my Circle MOC, they now had black uniforms with green scarves.
Back to me and spring-winter 2023. There was about to be Pii Poo's Lego event in Pori, and I knew I had to display Circle there. But I wanted to have the complete current line-up, so I built Richard Dawson. It took a few days before the event (that was three weeks ago). It was made easy due to black colour scheme; it's painless to make all the joints in black, and I didn't have to worry about details because there wasn't many in the black costume! The hardest part was thus the face and the hair - Dawson has a long hair and relatively round facial features with high forehead. I wanted the style to be similar to my other Circle figures, so I didn't went far with more modern adjustable eyebrows - partly also because Dawson's eyebrows are not that dominant. So while this creation does not have anything revolutionary technique-wise, I think it fills it part in the broader MOC.I built the guitar after completing the figure. According to the gig photos I found, Dawson used two guitars in Circle, a black or dark blue Fidelity and red Stratocaster (or similar). I ended up building the Stratocaster for two reasons: First, the Fidelity's colour would have been hard to tell apart from the black clothes, and I wanted to see colour on this MOC (as I always do). Secondly, its head was very small and slender, and it would have been very hard to build it! When making the original MOC, I chose to make the guitars rather bulky, with two-stud-wide necks and correct number of tuning pegs. Not entirely realistic and somewhat funny - but still probably more fitting than thin and dainty ones. So Dawson's instrument is likely too large too, and I'm not that happy with its head, but I hope that's ok. It uses some parts from official Ideas Stratocaster set I reviewed for New Elementary.
-Eero.