Neito niemen nenässä

Bio-Cup is over. Second place is decent. It was hell of a fight!

This is the last build from New Elementary's Flowerfest. It was built before Strax though; I had used most of the warmly hued dark red and orange pieces on Greta Ericales, and was left with some interesting olive green plant parts, dark tan crowns and handful of bright light yellow plate flowers and white blossoms. I took, once again, a hair route. I had never made a character with Bright Light Yellow hair (I think!), as the colour has been quite limited in parts available; but these flowers enabled a neat curly hair look, and there was plenty of them. The colour works well with tan skin colour, as there are not many blonde hair options. Yellow looks too, well, yellow, and same hair and skin colour would look silly. The hair was complete with the white blossoms tied in, connected with the short flower stalks. They are tan and hide themselves nicely within the bright light yellow.

The concept for the rest of the model wasn't clear while I was building the head. after completing it, I chose to take an elegant and stylised route, something akin to The Milky Way / Speed of Light, an another New Elementary model. I built a white, flowing night dress, with ball joint waist to give it natural posture and an ornament made of bright light yellow and olive green plant parts to give it folk costume feel - and to utlise some of the set parts. This further settled the colour scheme: Light but toned down natural hues, close to symbolic school of painting in the turn of the 20th century. I had recently bought a book on Pekka Halonen, a golden age nature painter, and wanted to somehow try to capture the feel of his work. The name - Finnish for Maiden at the Cape-Nose - is taken from one of his paintings (where it is in plural, though, taken again from Kalevala). 

With this colour scheme, I added more nature elements, as well as knew I'd use this light blue backdrop cardboard I had acquired from boom store closing sale. To complete the scene, I built the shallow strand for the figure to stand on, completed with sedges, probably cattails; as well as a forced perspective rocky point farther away. This made it possible to use the pretty olive green spruce trees from the set - they are hard to use for a character builder! I also made a couple of pines madwith dark orange antennae as trunks. The opposite shore is just a silhouette - and I had to redesign it during the shoot, as it was way too short in the beginning.

There are many variations of the image, as the figure, although static in "legs", has posable arms, waist and neck. The large empty space on the right makes it possible to use these as exhibit posters and such - and we did. I'm updating my semi-permanent exhibit on Hervanta Library, Tampere, and we're hosting an opening party with Finnish Lego Masters series 2 champion Aura Kangasniemi on Thursday 17th August 16:30 onwards. Be there or be a rectangular thingy! 

-Eero.