The Wanderer (2)

 Here I am again, posting off the backlog. I had a 3-month vacation in Europe, travelling by boat, bus & train, and right afterwards the biggest Lego convention in Finland so far, with some pretty big architecture models. It's all finished now. I have two New E builds from my article on a couple of Super Mario sets, and after them I'll get into the buildings. Or, at first, one of them - the others might follow a bit later on. But they will follow.

This is The Wanderer, also known as the Emperor of Kamigawa, a character from Magic: The Gathering. I've built her before, too, in 2019 and with a much smaller inventory of bright pink parts. This model accompanied my Super Mario article as the sets included some parts in this colour; also some parts from the white billowing hair are from those sets. This time I upped the scale to my "rock'n'roll" figure scale, with allowed more; and I made a full poseable figure instead of a fixed pose from the card; I tried my best to have flowing shapes instead of jarring patterns; and I gave her actual face, because her face was, in the time between, revealed in the cards. I also changed sand green into turquoise, as it meant I could use those big curved parts I had acquired from The Lego House's AFOL day Pick a Brick in 2019. As I disassembles the original model only after finishing this new one, I can spoil you a bit with a comparison image. Wanderer has grown up.

 Even though there are more bright pink pieces around now, the biggest challenges nevertheless culminated on the challenge of limited colours. The hem of the dress, fitting the upper legs inside, went through several version; it consists of two L-shaped panels connected to the back with adjustable double ball joints. The another bit that took many tries was the sleeved pink arm, completed with a rotating and swiveling joint for realistic range of movement. In the end, I made a technic-pin-hole-and-boat-stud joint work, and even managed to fill the back of it with a another boat stud, connected with a pony ear tech. It is certainly more reliable than the old two-stud joint. 

I'm very happy with the boots; I feel like I couldn't really understand how the worked on the first time (and there probably weren't any uncropped images back in 2019). The golden angled... things below the knee were especially satisfying. The hat, on the other hand, was a battle I barely managed. I wanted to avoid too big hats, which made her look like a toadstool, and simple dish shapes just didn't do it - they sat too high. This is a bit of a compromise. I almost re-used the old hat, but hell, the pattern was too jagged and noisy; It didn't match. This lacks the golden rim, but sits on the head a bit better.

The cape/scarf was fun to build - as I mentioned earlier, those pieces had waited for a use for a good while. The billowing in the wind is captured on the original The Wanderer card art, and I wanted to recapture it. It used all of my plates larger than 1x4 in dark turquoise, though I've managed to restock afterwards. The cape's shape is reflected in the hair, which I think looks decent - though the use of those large white curved parts was mostly inspired by the fact that they were in the reviewed Mario set. I also liked the old version with its Technic figure flippers, but hell, you've got to move with the times.

 -Eero.