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.

Greta Ericales + Exhibition

The beginning of this year has been quiet here - as before, I've been mostly working on a large modular building. However, that's not everything: My post on New Elementary's Flowerfest came out recently, and here's the first character from it - built using parts from 10314 Dried Flower Centrepiece. And some other parts, too; this is not an alternative build.

The aim was to build a character with elaborate, uniform-like clothing using rich dark red and orange hues from the set. The paddle petals formed a simple pleated skirt, whilst the longer wing pieces worked as coattails. The orange epaulette was an interesting new recolour in the set, and I was sure to use those as ornamental buttons or toggles. Their connection was more complicated than expected, but worked fine in the end. Orange flippers and some more paddle petals added some nice layering to the top of the attire, and I kept the arms and legs relatively simple to avoid making the character over-designed. Dark orange pumpkins made a very nice hair buns; the long pigtails are nothing new, as I've used those balloon panels as hair sooo many times, but whatever; they work pretty well, and there aren't many good hair options in dark orange.

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.