Flameguard
I decided to participate with a group of friends in a Secret Santa collab, where the objective was to make something based on our assigned person's portfolio of builds. From remaking an individual build to taking design motifs and creating an original build, there's a lot of versitility here. This year, I was assigned Marshall (Cornbuilder). Marshall builds in quite a variety of genres including Technic cars, fantasy knights, and dinosaurs. I was initially inclined to make something creature related, but a combination of scolling through some of his knight builds along with me having a knight build as a 'future builds' list item made me go with the latter.
Thematically, I based the build off of his MOC "Ulric, the Firebright". Having some sort of elemental pop would break the monotomy of the armor. When experimenting with helmet designs, I landed on using the Bionicle creature head for part of the helmet, which Marshall had used for his build "Branogenium, the Brute". I then played around with some gradient colors and found the combination of the creature head blending into the ghost pedestal to be the perfect helmet tail/feather - a further callback to the flaming one on Ulric. To give the build an ethereal look, I used a chrome blue visor for the eyes rather than transparent or solid elements. Instead of having to let in light to see the eyes, the visor reflected it, which made it easier to see.
I wanted to lean into the dark fantasy design for the MOC, which heavily influenced the armor design. Lego has a lot of silver elements; however, most of them are very greebly/mechanical. The creature head from the helmet and Skull Spider masks had the texture I was looking for - smooth yet having some regal details. The slight detail on the wing knives further matched this texture. Funnily enough, when I got to the shin armor design, I had originally used CCBS shins; however, those ended up having the opposite problem - being too smooth and not enough detail. As a result, I opted for a brick built version.
A major challenge in this build was including all the different clothing layers in such a small space. For the torso, the armor assembly was already bulky, and trying to figure out a way to wrap it around and maintain the established texture was tricky. I decided to break the layer and have the sides as chainmail as the chain pieces were more flexible in wrapping around the body. As is a common trope with dark fantasy knights, I wanted to also include a waist cape. The cloth used in this build are two sails from a Ninjago set. It's held using the same technique I've used for textiles this year: train magnets. This layer needed to appear to be under the armor. The inclusion of the zipline belt helped to sell this illusion by breaking the path of the chainmail layer. Then, I had the actual clothing underneath for which I used simple CCBS shells.
In keeping with the dark fantasy theme, I went with darker accent colors. The silver was already bright, so the inclusion of dark blue for the waist cloth and black for the clothing layer helped bring the silver down. The base also uses gunmetal to further bring down the silver. Lastly, I wanted to tie in the elemental power of the warrior, which I reflected in the accessories. I ended up using trans-dark blue elements rather than trans-light blue for the sword as it was easier to view against the silver. The flame carried in the other hand uses another ghost pedestal, and although it has some trans-light blue in it, the marbling of dark blue in these elements makes the trans-light blue a bit darker. Of course, I ended up also complementing the part with some additional elements for shaping.
And that's about it for this build. This was one was very tricky with all the layering and being a humanoid build in general, but the result definitely matches the original vision I had. I'm very happy with how the eyes and expression turned out - in my build space, the lighting was a lot different, so the eyes never looked right in WIP pics, but the final photoshoot turned out better than I could have imagined.
