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.