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.

 

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.

Power Song

Be the lungs

Be the heart beating

Be the muscle and sinew

Be the movement

 

This is my final entry for Bio-Cup 2023. The theme is Sports. The idea was my first one: A character that emphasizes movement, not just in posing but also by showing an (allegorical?) muscle system made of ziplines. Now, I've been using plenty of ziplines in my entries so far, but they've been brown and have represented leather and vines; stuff of nature.

This model has another level, too. It's somewhat uncanny giant half-robotic figure reflecting the running miniland figure which, along most of the base, is made of System. This reflects how damn complicated large Bionicle etc. constraction figures are to build, and hehehe, figure out. The parts are weird and multishaped and laugh at the system. The trick is finding how to connect them to the right angle and it's not always easy. The reward is the flow - essential in a build like this. This model, like the whole cup, has been rewarding - but not something I'd like to do the whole year round.

The character started with legs. The ankle joint is very illegal and took several reworkings to be able to support the whole figure - everything is on one ball joint... but it had to be a ball joint, because a very slight sideways angle is needed to balance everything. The model is so heavy that a rigid ankle with liftarm connections, for example, would never have worked. Even the twisting of a 3L axle caused problems here; the only key was a real balanced state - just like on real humans... Only my model was fixed in time and the factor of real movement couldn't be taken into the calculation.

The beginning of the zipline muscle system were the 7-line fibres running from the knees to the diaphragm. I believe this is the most important muscle when running, though it's obviously really not that long. These fibes connect to another zipline in the stomach, making the flexible enough for running poses (as you can see, the connecting zipline is diagonal). The neck fibres also dual-function as the wires of the headphones - referring to the name of the creation and also to the importance of music during running to many. They end up in the lower back. The arm fibres are more cosmetic - arms are not essential when running. The help to keep the colours more balanced.

The face deserves a special mention. My "basic human face" would have been too small here. The first idea was some sort of helmet, making the figure less human-like and more of a Bionicle hero paragon image. But as the model emphasised human mobility, it didn't feel fitting and I didn't find any good designs. This face tries to realistically portray human face. It might be somehow uncanny, but then again, that would the feel of 7-metre-tall robot human running alongside you. The manhole cover and the lamppost were added to accent this otherworldiness of the scale.

-Eero.