The Wizard's Emissary
It was only a matter of time before I did another bird MOC for Bio-Cup, and with the increasing talent and difficulty of these later rounds, I decided to hone in on one of my favorite creatures to build. For round 2, I was placed in the “Wizard” sub-theme, and while I initially felt restricted in having to build a humanoid, I ended up finding some inspiration that resonated with me; in particular, the various fantasy owl designs by Ryota Murayama (Ovopack) caught my eye. A lot of their artwork features perched owls, and so I wanted to do the same. To further drive home the wizard theme, I decided the owl should be perched on a wizard’s staff. This ended up presenting quite the technical challenge in not adding any additional supports to the owl, but I believed this would be necessary to create an impactful and striking final image.
I first began with the owl’s head to set the scale. I used a combination of similarly feathered parts for texture, and used the same eye technique of Technic rubber bands as the yellow iris from Karashishi. I decided early on to go for a cooler color scheme, and figured with the recent release of the Kingfisher, I could make a sand blue plumage with the banana leaves. Knowing that I wanted to add a cloak and a fur collar, I built in a bar wheel around the neck. However, I then needed to get the rest of the shaping of the owl done first to provide something for the cloth to rest on.
I filled out the chest with a combination of Nuva mask recolors in white. Those parts then transition to more barb elements as well as a Chima fur add-on. In contrast to my Avian Bonsai MOC from 2022, I decided to use less Chima fur add-ons this time, as they were a bit too sharp in texture and didn’t provide quite a good transition from the face. As mentioned before, the wings mostly use banana leaves; however, there are some other similarly textured parts in there such as the Hero Factory shell and Technic propeller blade. There is also a Chima feather in dark blue beneath the sand blue feathers for a little gradient.
The legs use a big fig arm from the Overwatch character Winston. I used stronger Technic and bar connections since all the weight was going to be transferred through the legs. Rather than putting a connection at the center of the base of the foot, I decided to use a 1x1 with perpendicular bar on both feet, and have that as the connection to the stand. Since the owl is more front heavy, its weight is already on the front of the foot, and the 1x1 helps anchor it from behind.
With the shaping of the owl completed, I could now attach cape pieces to create a cloak. Using what I learned from my Cait Sith MOC, I placed a train magnet in the body, with the intention of using a second magnet to bound the cloth elements. For the actual cloak, I used cloth elements from the buildable figures Darth Maul for the upper portion of the cloak and Kylo Ren for the lower portion of the cloak. I stuffed an additional minifigure cape at the tail end of the cloak to cover the holes in the Kylo Ren cape.
Lastly, I went through several iterations for the collar. I struggled quite a bit trying to find the right parts, as most barb pieces I was using ended up being at the same scale of detail as the surrounding elements. I eventually settled on using minifigure hair pieces, as their finer and smaller scale of detail relative to the surrounding textures helped it read better.
Now on to the staff. For this thing to be stable, I knew I had to use some technic liftarms rather than just a straight axle running up. I also needed to make it compact to allow elements to wrap around it. I ended up using a boat mast as the internal support, as it was tall enough and saved a lot of space. Also, it has an axle connection at the bottom, and with the right anchoring, it could be stable but also detachable (for transporting this MOC to conventions). In the System base, there is a removable axle perpendicular to the mast, and I built the base such that the slopes can be taken out to access this axle.
The staff texture is very organic, as I wanted to go for a wooden texture. Big macs are used at the top, where they wrap around an old space canopy that represents a crystal. For the crystal, I was on the fence between using trans-dark blue or trans-light blue. Trans-light blue has a greater part selection; however, it conflicted with the already lighter blue tones of the owl. By setting the crystal to trans-dark blue, an analogous color gradient is created between the lighter blues of the owl and the darker blues of the crystal and is more pleasing to the eye (in my opinion). I continued the crystal design down at the base - partly as an effort to hide off portions of the staff that I couldn’t cover due to trying to taper the staff’s shaping. Though it looks like a lot of System, there are a few CCBS shells in trans-dark blue used at the base. I tried to use mostly sharper shaped parts here as well, to contrast the staff’s organic texture as well as crystals just being sharp in general. Lastly, there is a Kaukau behind the main crystal at the top of the staff. Since it's transparent, I wanted to play around with some reflections a bit. Not really sure if it's noticeable in the final picture, but it's there.
Being a Bio-Cup build, this MOC came together rather quickly. I’ve now built quite a few birds, and this one in particular shares a similar structure to Avian Bonsai, so I was able to blitz through building the owl quite quickly. The difficulty, of course, came in the added cloak, color palette, and trying to have the owl perched without additional support. Though it was a lot of trial and error, I’m happy with how it turned out. After initially completing the build and having it in front of me, there was a sense of, “wow, I can’t believe it actually worked”. I know I mentioned it in Karashishi, but it feels like every MOC I’ve made this year has been building on previous MOCs, and I’m excited to continue this momentum - hopefully through more rounds of Bio-Cup should I make it through this round.
