Commander Strax

 So, before I got distracted by Bio-Cup, and in generally building, I was posting my models from new Elementary's Flowerfest. This won't be the last MOC of it but this was the last one I built; I had used most of the interesting parts but I still wanted to so something with the medium nougat pauldrons used as rose petals in the set. I just fiddles with them and sculpted with them; I noticed that the bar connection made a nose, and I was able to make another connection inside by sticking a clip between the support prongs of the bar addition. The medium nougat mudguards from the set made humorous ears.

I first thought it would make a humorous stereotypical "politician", with a suit and a tie. But I had been watching some Dr. Who (Capaldi series) and it struck me that the doodle looked quite a bit like good Sontaran Commander Strax... The suit would still have been appropriate, as Strax tends to wear suit in Victorian London, but I went with the full Sontaran armour as it was recognizable - and I wanted to use some sand blue I had gathered. The head jutted perfectly into the ring of macaroni bricks, so I knew I was in the right direction. I didn't use any other Botanical set parts in this, as the ones I used were heavily enough in the focus - and sand and dark blue colour scheme didn't offer any possibilities.

Working with limited colour was relatively easy; Strax's physics and Sontaran armour design is well suited fot brick building. Funnily the dark blue shoulder pads were the hardest part, as I didn't seem to have any hollow bit in the right colour (I only got two dark blue bohrok head shells some time later). I solved this by making the pauldrons separate blocks with joints for both the shouder and the rest of the arm; thsi allowed a natural stance. The sand blue areas formed itself around few different elegantly shaped curved parts from early 2000's my childhood sets.

The eyes were late addition. It looked alright (and rather dramatic!) with just dark areas under the neanderthalian brow. They eyes help to focus on the head, though. They're 1x1 round tiles connected to battle droid arms.

Sonta-Ha!

-Eero.

Harvest Merchants

 I was supposed the post those remaining Flowerfest models, wrote the texts and everything, but ended up being unable to post them; or to put it better, I just didn't. Probably writing those Instagram tags is too bothersome. They will be the next ones... right. My summer holiday started, I had a canoeing trip, and I came back home just in time for Bio-Cup's Round 2 with theme of Biomes - Flatlands that ends tomorrow-ish. Two of the suggested subjects were farmers and hunter tribe, and I combined the ideas to a nomad tribe thing, that ended up being two matoran merchants and their prehistoric lizard (or amphibian, maybe) friend. 

The beast of burden was going to be silver and rhino-esque at first, but I ended overthinking it and working in silver wasn't fun at all. Bionicle has too much silver! I dumbed all that and returned to the recently looted dark red Fenrakk (Skirmix) heads I had tried to use in the previous build. I used them as reptile heads, but I suppose the huge lower jaw and lever lizard eyes are enough to make difference. I purposefully made the lizard fat and jolly, slow and friendly-looking. It was a fun build and uses lot of real Bionicle parts around a liftarm spine; there is no CCBS at all and even the system per cent is relatively slow, especially in the lizard. I managed to make the building fun after ditching the silver; key to success! The build was strongu defined when I tied the tohunga head statue to the back. And the lizard didn't even have a head back then...

The matorans are completely new design. Foremost, I wanted them to be small to make the lizard friend look big enough. I emulated Tohunga physics with more poseability (and sadly fragile arms). The red Ta-Matoran guy is tougher, as he smokes a pipe and carries a bamboo disc, classical matoran defence weapon. I suppose he's the boss, as he's not carrying a bag. The Po-Matoran is more local-coded with a funny hat, sort of a coat and fabuland bag. I knew there had to be a funny hat in this trio; they needed one.

-Eero.

Seize the Night

 

This is the prelim entry of Bio-Cup 2023. Wish me luck! I've been rather sluggish in posting the New Elementary Flowerfest models, but I've now written the remaining two to be ready; just had to take a break to fit this in before the deadline.

 

The theme for the preliminary round is Villain. A good, universal, character packed theme. It wasn't the easiest for me; I'm generally more into good guys. I always side with the good guys. Empire has cool gadgets and walkers, but I'm still in Rebel Alliance camp, ever day. But the entry had to be a villain! What does that mean? Antagonist, the opposing force of the protagonist? Or simply someone who's bad? I went to the second route and tried to capture few villain clichés in a cool way. As this is for the Cup, I mad a real constraction figure, lessening the amount of System a lot from what I usually do: The base is system, of course, as are the feet and the upper arms; but rest is based on the technic/bonkle system. It was refreshing, really. I've been doing a lot of architecture lately.

 

Blood red armour? Yeah! Blood red armour with an evil demon-face on the chest? Hell yeah! The armour face was my seed part; the pauldrons were going to be dark red Fenrakk (Skirmix?) heads, but they were way too big. The wheel hub was there from early on, I like its pattern with three 6x6 dishes underneath. The spiky KK2 armours deserved more loce, and Skrall armours are one of the nice, not over-designes bonkle parts I enjoy. Humorously I think that them, the knee spikes and the Y ball sockets are the only Bionicle-introduced parts here; but hey, there have been many constraction themes.

 

Aside the armour, pose was one of the main points here. She's a villain, but she's winning. She's like a villain and a protagonist. Forward! Knee up, sword in front and rising the flag. The flag pole was there from the early on, but I swapped it to the other hand and added the bat sword, meaning she can put some weight on the pole, making the pose feel more impressive. I chose a bright red hair as Tahu Star's sword looked to nice with its gradient, and the red eyelines separates the face from my usual ones. Seize the Night! Seize the Cup! Gonna be a busy summer again!

 

 -Eero.

Palutena's new hair!

This is a shorter post for a weekend, as the subject is just an addition to an older model. I built another Palutena (with Wario and some scenery) for my LUG's contest in April 2022, but wasn't quite happy with her hair. It wasn't an easy case - the hair should be long, which means heavy, but also able to hang from the back of the head (as usually...) and the head should be poseable, with a ball joint keeping it upright. And green isn't the most widely available colour in my collection. Well, actually, Palutena's bangs and other "head-hair" here are bright green, as some parts in it were just perfect.. but I had no means for making the long flock bright green, and thus it was green - and a bit puny...

Jump to this spring. I was taking part to New Elementary's Flowerfest, and was making own models with Dried Flower Centerpiece and Daffodils. I had plenty of ideas for the dried flower parts (one build out here, two still incoming - but naturally published on New Elementary) but was struck black with the daffodils. Then I realised, hey - that's plenty of neat dynamic and light green pieces, the large fin pieces with female click joints! They felt excellent for this use. The only bugger was there weren't any green connectors with male click joints, at least not in my collection; the set uses sand green ones for unknown reasons. This made angling the pieces naturally challenging, but I think I nailed it just fine. One of the fins is connected with a mixel ball joint, but I even managed to hide the grey connector pretty well.

-Eero.

Greta Ericales + Exhibition

The beginning of this year has been quiet here - as before, I've been mostly working on a large modular building. However, that's not everything: My post on New Elementary's Flowerfest came out recently, and here's the first character from it - built using parts from 10314 Dried Flower Centrepiece. And some other parts, too; this is not an alternative build.

The aim was to build a character with elaborate, uniform-like clothing using rich dark red and orange hues from the set. The paddle petals formed a simple pleated skirt, whilst the longer wing pieces worked as coattails. The orange epaulette was an interesting new recolour in the set, and I was sure to use those as ornamental buttons or toggles. Their connection was more complicated than expected, but worked fine in the end. Orange flippers and some more paddle petals added some nice layering to the top of the attire, and I kept the arms and legs relatively simple to avoid making the character over-designed. Dark orange pumpkins made a very nice hair buns; the long pigtails are nothing new, as I've used those balloon panels as hair sooo many times, but whatever; they work pretty well, and there aren't many good hair options in dark orange.

But in the end, something on this character didn't work; for starters, it was very hard to keep intact. Now, I've made a lot of fragile models in the past, but I've been getting better at sturdiness; but this was a painstaking one. There were problems with the skirt/waist connection, the coattails dropped off, and most importantly, the head was a mess, all the time. There's something troublesome with the jaw consisting of two 1x2 cheese slopes, connected with their back studs only; they wobble, get misaligned and drop off all the time. But 1x2 double slope (nor any of its variants) isn't available in dark tan (nor, for example, in medium nougat). For the sake of diversity I wish they'd release those parts; or maybe is should just gid gud in making those faces. Sight.

Greta Ericales has already been demolished, but I displayed it at Pii Poo's event in Turku of Finland three weeks ago. I'm also currently having a new exhibition in Messukylä library, Tampere - titled Osa-alue -  until 29th of May. Check it out! I'm quite happy with how I was able to set the display with very limited array of furniture and a rather weirdly-designed (but big) glass cabinet.

Helia Manning

 

More music-themed builds for 2023! This one continues my "rock'n'roll" scale band member series. She's a singer, so no instruments here; but for sake of posing I added a microphone tripod... and a huge amplifier, inspired by Ralf Langer's Open Air 2053. I wanted to explore how to capture the lifelike and lively stances of a singer, so the figure had to be relative sturdy and flexible. Of course, not having a heavy instrument makes the posing easier.

I had had that dress hem doodle on a tabel for a while, and almost parted it out before realizing it could work here. This character itself started with the sfootwear - black leather boots or military shoes with heavy-duty sole profile and silver buckles. I wanted to something entirely different from the dainty high heels of Lydia Frenckell, the previous character of this series. However, I did not want this character to be overall heavy metal esque - I wanted to to create a contrast between these heavy and more feminine elements of the attire. So to continue upwards from the boots I grabbed the dress hem tablescrap, added the flower belt and made a matching bright light orange bodice (which took plenty of adjustments during the whole process). I'm particularly happy with the magenta dot pattern below the neckline.

Again, the fingerless gloves match the boots, using skeleton warrior -themed minifig chestplates. I've had a small collection of those armour parts around for new uses for years, but haven't managed to use them that often (okay, Lydia's aforementioned shoes had a pair). Their shape is such nice. It's also nice to see that we've got enough reddish brown parts for arm joints now - no black pieces needed! Who would have known ten years ago?

The head and the hair call back to Virva Staccato, the third character of this series - but this time it uses one big balloon tire. This is an older tire from late 90s or early 00s, and it is somehow more round than the newer balloon tires; I actually experimented with a newer and bigger tire, but it wasn't that good; probably due to the profile being larger, it didn't look like fluffy hair. This one stays in place nicely, and actually helps the head to stay in one piece: if the head falls off (as it sometimes does due to being heavy) it tends to hit the floor hair first and bounce a couple of times harmlessly. The zipline braid holding the hair up was suggested by the clever folk on EPLUG - thanks! It works well.

The microphone stand is a simple affair. I made it silver-grey to make it shand out from the black amplifier and the black gloves; candle pieces are of good diameter for this scale. I tried a non-Lego sewing string for the cord, but it wasn't too thick. Now the cord is a bit short, but has enough thickness to look convincing. I think its curve and flow adds some important authenticity to the whole. The amplifier was designed around those big balloon tires turned inside-out, and the red and yellow 6x6 dishes were a late swap to make it fit the colourful aesthetics of the group. The amp has been designed to work both horizonally and vertically - hence it's quite smooth and without visible knobs and switches.

-Eero.