The Wingnut Crew

We are living the Bio-Cup! It is semifinal time, and the themes are punk-triplets: Steampunk (that's mine), Dieselpunk and Cyberpunk. Now, steampunk is rather familiar setting to me, having built plenty of things in this theme from minifigure barfs to large buildings and early character builds. There's even a pretty large tag about it in this blog. I haven't touched the theme lately, though - maybe once or twice during the last 7 years; it somehow lost its shine. I get enough of goggles on top hats and random cogs everywhere... But the general aesthetics is still pleasant, and some steampunk classics like Miyazaki's Laputa are still as good as ever.

I had some early ideas on Bionicle Steampunk, but they didn't come out naturally so I took a break from my two previous Matoran builds and made a trio on (relatively) human characters. It was going to be 1-2 characters at first, but at some point I had torso of one character (the Guard, on the left on the main image) a leg of another (the Engineer, on the right) and the head of a third character (the Mechanic, on the centre - the beard didn't fit the wing breastplate of the Guard). The method was very much part-based: I has some parts I wanted to use and then I just tried to get them flowing. 

The 90's concept wheel hub on the Guard's armour was the main seed part, and it made a nice combo with the flat silver wings and the round pauldrons; the rest evolved around these. Lord Business's tie cape had a cool air, and I combined it with official-looking cap, double moustache and a jutting Technic cam jaw. The Mechanic is bit of a self-portrait - he also has a Dublo wrench. The drill wormscrew was going to be in this from the beginning. The Engineer depicts a common Steampunk fashion of leather corsetry with white undershirt; it uses two prints from Ideas Stratocaster, the fretboard on the corset and the pickups as buttons. I'm especially happy with the contrast of the pauldroned jackhammer arm with the white shirt, as well as the tiny black beret. Gadunka skulls were my Bio-Cup part use goals list and they formed a skirt; the colour brings some energy to amid the warm and metallic hues of steampunk.

-Eero.