Virna Murolee

Welcome to the 500th post on Cyclopic Bricks! The first post was published on 14th March 2012. On the first months there were several miscellaneous posts and many WIPs, but I dare say that over 90 % of posts have included a new own creation.

This is Virna Murolee who plays the trombone; a relatively fast and straightforward build after the Pii Poo Helsinki exhibition and hours and days and weeks of architecture building (and a three-week Europe trip with mostly architecture content). A manifestation of the sheer joy of building something more lively with zero focus on the availability of parts for window grids and no optimising of grey tile usage. I had bought those large orange wedges quite a while ago for this use, but hadn't come to use them until now.

Quite amusingly, the model was built literally bottom-up, from shoes to the bun - even the trombone was built before the hair. The shoes were the first element, although I revisited them later on to make them flow better; I also took a stud off length from the lower legs in middle of the photo shoot, as the proportions didn't really work... The most interesting tech is in the waist and the upper torso. There is a ball joint there to enable some jamming poses, and the A-frame is firmy connected on a 2x2x2/3 "hay bale" grille brick. A-frames are also used on the hem of the dress, just behind the yellow triangle. There isn't indefinitely array of orange parts, so I had to try to be clever with them!

Virna is part of the same band with the other musician figures on the same scale, but the aesthetics are more glamorous here. Large chrome crystal earrings were a wild try, but worked rather nice, looking pretty with reddish brown and white. They also matched the silver trombone - I had no right pieces for a golden one; strangely enough the macaroni tubes are not yet available in pearl gold, which generally feels quite overused colour. I had built most of the character when I decided that this should be the trombone player I was suggested in Instagram when I posted Lydia Frenckell about a year ago (feels longer). But somehow it made a great match with the classy aesthetics, being more an orcherstral instrument. Still very fitting for rock'n'roll.

The long white gloves and the chrome silver headband completed the look and balanced the colour scheme. The orange looked especially nice with a blue backdrop. It took a while to find good posing, as the mouthpiece covers part of the face - something that a human looker naturally concentrates at (I think). It's also hard to sturdily hold the long instrument with those clip wrists and skeleton arm fingers. But I think I managed it in the end.

-Eero.

Ronin Untasi

 This model was mostly made in a couple of days after coming back from our 3-week trip across Europe. Before the trip all of my free time for weeks had been used to finish the architecture MOCs for Pii Poo's Helsinki event, and the event took place straight after we came back home. I had longed for building some character MOCs for quite a while.

However, this is also highly recycling-oriented character. The torso was mostly about an year old, designed after Gozen as another try on non-historic female samurai armour. The centerpiece was a dragon-printed 4x4 curved wedge from Junior Ninjago set - such a novel but pretty part. The legs are about two years old and very close to the original tablescrap that ended up populating the odd'n'ends bin for quite a while. I combined them by adding some pretty Dark Azure armour plates on the legs, continuing the quarter tile pattern from below the belt and again connecting to the black bonds on the upper legs. I wanted to make a somewhat weird, quirky armour suit, without too much emphasis on practicality, save historical accuracy.

An another pivotal idea was the asymmentry of the armour. Both of the legs had originally (2 years ago) kneepads, but I had already (probably?) ditched the other one when I left them waiting. When rediscovering them to this built I continued this motif to the arms. I took the same scale mail pattern made with crown/eggshell pieces, but the right arm got only a bracer while the sword arm is fully armoured and completed with a shoulder pad. 

Lavender is a nice hair colour, but hard to use due to limited array of available parts. The hair thus went through many iterations, and I settled with a style that has a very short buzz-cut on the right side. It felt fitting to the asymmetrical theme and the proto-contemporary samuraipunk aesthetics. In addition, the ponytail and the fan-shaper earrings gave some movement to the build.  

-Eero.