Ihminen

 

I built this model in summer for New Elementary's mini bunny festival, which utilised parts from 31162 Cute Bunny, especially focusing on 7037 Brick 2x2x⅔ Half Circle with 2 Studs and Curved Top - here used on the nose (pun intended). The bunny is an excellent parts pack for a character builder; I had two to play with. Furthermore, this is a love letter to all the other sweet curved tan pieces we've gotten during the last couple of years. I think this is one of my best works so far.

 

 My initial inspiration and starting point was Emil Vikström's Pohjan Neito statue in my hometown Tampere (image in the end of the article). It's along one of my regular walking routes now as I live in the centre. There's certain simple serenity in it that I like; the statue is quite small and high up, so it takes keen eyes to see it in detail! There are elements of it in my version's facial features, but instead of the straight flocks (or hood) framing the face I made a tight bun; the aim was to display the shape of the face as unobscured as possible. Furthermore, the bun works as a balancing element in the back so that there's something interesting in all angles.

I wrote about the technical things in the New Elementary article, so I won't repeat them here. In general, the process was straightforward and enjoyable, which implies that the tan toolkit is currently well-equipped. The 2x2 quarter round curved slope is especially pleasant piece - I recently ordered 50 more in Tan from Pick-a-Brick.

 In a way, this model goes pack to DK's Great LEGO book released around 1999 and widely available in Finnish back in the day; I had it as a kid, and it showed me the potential of Travis brick, for example (I had two of them, in intensive circulation between different MOCs). The interesting thing in the book (compared to more recent Lego books) is that it had very little minifigure content but abundance of human characters in different scales, mostly models built for Legoland. Along with Bionicle, it might have pushed me into character builds in the long run; showing that Lego is not only about vehicles and houses and fire stations for minifigures.

-Eero.