Harvest Merchants

 I was supposed the post those remaining Flowerfest models, wrote the texts and everything, but ended up being unable to post them; or to put it better, I just didn't. Probably writing those Instagram tags is too bothersome. They will be the next ones... right. My summer holiday started, I had a canoeing trip, and I came back home just in time for Bio-Cup's Round 2 with theme of Biomes - Flatlands that ends tomorrow-ish. Two of the suggested subjects were farmers and hunter tribe, and I combined the ideas to a nomad tribe thing, that ended up being two matoran merchants and their prehistoric lizard (or amphibian, maybe) friend. 

The beast of burden was going to be silver and rhino-esque at first, but I ended overthinking it and working in silver wasn't fun at all. Bionicle has too much silver! I dumbed all that and returned to the recently looted dark red Fenrakk (Skirmix) heads I had tried to use in the previous build. I used them as reptile heads, but I suppose the huge lower jaw and lever lizard eyes are enough to make difference. I purposefully made the lizard fat and jolly, slow and friendly-looking. It was a fun build and uses lot of real Bionicle parts around a liftarm spine; there is no CCBS at all and even the system per cent is relatively slow, especially in the lizard. I managed to make the building fun after ditching the silver; key to success! The build was strongu defined when I tied the tohunga head statue to the back. And the lizard didn't even have a head back then...

The matorans are completely new design. Foremost, I wanted them to be small to make the lizard friend look big enough. I emulated Tohunga physics with more poseability (and sadly fragile arms). The red Ta-Matoran guy is tougher, as he smokes a pipe and carries a bamboo disc, classical matoran defence weapon. I suppose he's the boss, as he's not carrying a bag. The Po-Matoran is more local-coded with a funny hat, sort of a coat and fabuland bag. I knew there had to be a funny hat in this trio; they needed one.

-Eero.