On the Hunt
After making it through preliminaries for Bio-Cup 2023, I was placed in the 'Rainforest' sub-theme for round one, with the overarching theme being 'Biomes'. This round was tough. Not so much the theme being difficult, but mainly because I got hit with a massive creative block. However, I still miraculously ended up with something to write about.
For this round, I decided to make a dinosaur because those were in ancient rainforests right? Well, at least the art I browsed online depicted them in those environments. I also hadn't really had any practice building bipedal creatures, so I settled on a theropod body type. The main color scheme of dark blue was my effort to not build something in black, as black is typically an easier color to work with due to its vast part library. In hindsight, I have no idea what I was thinking imposing all these additional challenges. Perhaps, it was the looming deadline - I wasted half of the round trying to make a completely different build and got nowhere. Anyhow, the stage was already set for a stressful round.
There are some parts that I'm happy about with the build though. For starters, the nose on the head uses the relatively new quarter dome piece (1871), which provides a shape that wasn't previously possible at this scale. Also, the inclusion of orange and magenta feathers with the dark red feathers on a backdrop of dark blue was nice. I do want to explore that color combination in the future because it is very pretty.
Now let's talk about the tree and the 'frog'. First, the whole side assembly was a very last minute build. The dinosaur alone wasn't enough (though it would have been funny if I just posted a random dinosaur with no context). The side build makes use of two slides (11267), which have a very smooth texture and trunk-like shape. They blend quite well with existing CCBS - as long as you can obscure the blocky ends. The 'frog' is sort of left up to interpretation; if anything, it's just a pair of frightened eyes hidden in the bushes. However, it helps create a story or at least some context of an event that could occur in a rainforest.