Yeah, So I've Sort of Been Wasting My Summer...

So it turns out that my summer was far less busy than I anticipated. I've been able to spend between six to eight hours a day reading and writing, but even with that I have more time than I know what to do with. Unfortunately, I rediscovered my old Lego collection a few weeks ago and have been sinking my time into that ever since. Because I'm out of ideas for what to do for these Monday from-the-vault posts, I figured I might as well do something in-between a shameful confession and proud display what I've spent all my time building.

As I've said in earlier posts, most of my building has been using Bionicle pieces so far, and I wanted to try out making similar models but with more standard bricks.

I wanted to make two models who contrasted with each other in interesting ways, so I ended with with a segmented, very articulable flying robot and a ground-based machine that's basically just one big chunk.

 I wanted this one to have a strange, unnerving quality to it, so I chose an accent color of lime green (which, fun fact, makes people so uncomfortable that many directors choose to light interrogation and torture scenes with it). And I guess this thing probably would be pretty scary if you were looking at it from minifigure-height.

From normal-human-height, though, it actually comes off as sort of cute, at least in my opinion. The wheel-and-arm build, which I meant to be unsettling since it's unclear if it is organic or mechanical, actually made it seem like an old fashioned wind-up toy. The enormous eyes were supposed to be like  roving spotlights (they can even move independently, though I didn't photograph it like that because, instead of being scary, it just looks like the thing has gone cross-eyed) but ends up making it look childish.

This mechanical dragon thing came much closer to my original vision than the other one, though I'm not entirely happy with it. Even with all the articulation, you can't pose it very well without it tipping over because it's much heavier on one side than the other.

Gotta say, I'm pretty happy with those wings, though. The canon on its back doesn't make very much sense since it would probably shoot things below, not above. Plus I didn't plan to make this thing some kind of war machine in the first place, but now that the canon is in the model looks sort of wonky without it. I guess years of making warrior-robots left me with some bad habits.