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ShaydDeGrai

[MOC] The Pillars of the Kings

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I've posted a few early drafts of the individual statues here before but I thought I'd share how things with a brand new King of the Eastern Shore model (the first draft had a little accident) , a revised King of the Western Shore, and a tiny fellowship in brick built boats for scale.

I hope you enjoy them.

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If you'd like to see more shots (including more close-ups) check out my MOCPages folder. As always, comment will be read, questions will be answered (eventually) so please feel free to say hi here or there.

Thanks for stopping by.

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I've posted a few early drafts of the individual statues here before but I thought I'd share how things with a brand new King of the Eastern Shore model (the first draft had a little accident) , a revised King of the Western Shore, and a tiny fellowship in brick built boats for scale.

I hope you enjoy them.

If you'd like to see more shots (including more close-ups) check out my MOCPages folder. As always, comment will be read, questions will be answered (eventually) so please feel free to say hi here or there.

Thanks for stopping by.

Great job :thumbup:

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Very well done! One of my favorite settings in the entire trilogy. Love the boats you've created as well.

These would make fantastic bookends. :tongue:

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Excellent work! :wub: The statues are very well sculpted! The boats are also clever made :thumbup:

Edited by Ecclesiastes

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I must post again: how did you made them? Did you use some program, or going from head? If "from head", did you drow some prelims with pencil, or planed in some other way? I was planing to build big sculpture, and some info would be helpfull :)

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Looks spectacular. :classic: The hand sticking out in a "stop" symbol looks really imposing. The helmet is very well designed and looks great.

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Good God, this is outstanding! *oh2* I like the scale. It is just perfect for Lego Minifigs.

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Absolutely fantastic *oh2* *oh2* *oh2* *oh2* *oh2*

The scale is perfect for LEGO minifig :thumbup: :thumbup:

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I must post again: how did you made them? Did you use some program, or going from head? If "from head", did you drow some prelims with pencil, or planed in some other way? I was planing to build big sculpture, and some info would be helpfull :)

The short answer is, it wasn't easy. My workbench looked like there'd been an explosion in a mannequin factory for a long while; hands, heads, feet everywhere in all different sizes and colors.

I'd wanted to do these for some time. I first got the idea when the Statue of Liberty kit came out and made a few aborted attempts at smaller, less detailed builds that I was never too keen on. Then, earlier this year when LEGO LOTR was announced I decided to try again, but this time I was armed with a few behind the scenes photo references of the models built by WETA for the movies (which is why one king has a sword instead of an axe, as in the book). I though of the photos as a reference, but not really a "blueprint" just like turning a book into a play, or a play into a movie, rendering a sculpture in LEGO bricks is a change in medium and you need to need to play to the strengths of that medium and the expectations of its audience, so don't get hung up on fidelity, do a good job of conveying the idea you want to get across and the viewer's imagination will smooth over the details.

In this case, I decided that the thing that would really sell the Argonath idea was the outstretched hands. If they weren't right it would be a lot harder to make the rest of it work. So I spent a lot of time just making hands. I made little ones, with just an angled plate and a plate hinge for a thumb and big ones that were larger than my own (If I'd kept them all I would have had my own answer to the Rodin Museum...). The trick was find the right balance of detail, shape and scale.

I did this mostly with a mix of hand sketches on graph paper (some of which I print myself to get a 2.5x3 box size that matches the proportions of a one stud brick), and good old fashioned rummaging and experimenting with parts. I dabble with LDD and ML-CAD from time to time (mostly when I'm not sure what pieces would capture a shape best and don't feel like opening 100 sorted ZipLoc baggies just to experiment) but the problem I have with the digital tools is that they're low end CAD programs, not true solid object modelers. They'll let to suspend pieces in mid air and allow you to "build" a model that would collapse under its own weight in the real world. They are great when you want to rummage through an infinite supply of rare and obscure parts looking for just the right piece that, when turned sideways and given a bit of a twist captures the shape that you're after, but for me, nothing beats building and rebuilding in real life.

Once I cooked up a hand I was happy with, it set the scale for the rest of the model. The fact that the hand was the key design piece also made things a little easier for the rest of the sculpture in that there's lots of data available about the proportions of the hand and the rest of human anatomy, so it set some guidelines for the rest of the design/build. For example, the length from the heel of the hand to the tip of the thumb is about the same as the distance from the tip of the chin to the bridge of the nose, and the eyes are roughly the halfway point on the head, so if the thumb is five and a half bricks long, the head should be about 11 bricks tall. Also the width of the hand (less the thumb) is approximately the spacing of the pupils for most people so now we have a sense of both width and height for the head. A "perfect" human is 8 heads tall (my figures are a bit shorter than that because I wanted a throw in just a subtle dash of mini-figure proportions). So this now I had a sense of how big the figure was going to be (this was also the point where I realized I didn't have nearly enough parts on hand and started ordering more as I continued to refine the design).

The first "draft" of the figure was a technic skeleton with properly sized and posable arms, legs, torso and a block of bricks for head. This would serve as my stand in as I tried to figure out what parts of the figure would be most visible and what the overall shape should be.

Next I started building heads. Again I resorted to staring at the reference photos, then sketching on paper, then building (repeat as necessary). The beard on the right hand statues was a particular point of frustration and I'm still not happy with it, but sometimes perfectionism gets in the way of progress and borders on procrastination. Other key focal points I built and re-built repeatedly were feet, weapons and the breastplate and chainmail skirt of the left hand figure.

I generally assumed that SNOT construction would be in play so I decided to just design the keys bits however they looked best and worry about how to pull all the bits together later. If you look carefully at this guy, you'll notice that the hand, sleeve, sword hilt and helm have very little logic as to which way the studs are going (and the inside is using a fair bit of SNOT-helpers and technic parts to hold it all together.

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As for the base and the robes, it really just came down to (sometimes less than patiently) building and rebuilding to see what worked and gave the overall model the feel of stone but the flow of cloth. I keep my posable technic skeleton handy to remind me of the overall shape I was going for, and secured key sub assemblies (like the feet or hands) in place as the core structure got tall enough to support them.

This was also a bit of trial and error. An early attempt looked like:

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Much of the form is there but the robe seemed to heavy and chunky, and the quarried mountainside seemed out of place. I put a lot of hours into building this guy so I was hesitant to take him apart. For better or worse, the choice to rebuild was taken from me when I tripped over my cat, dropped the figure *oh2* and discovered just how many different directions 5000 bricks can bounce. Very little of the original figure was salvageable, so my photos of it had to serve as the basis for the redesign, which came out like:

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I have no idea how many parts when into these guys in the end (they're pretty heavy despite being mostly hollow). I still have my original sketches but have dismantled most of my prototypes. A fair bit of planning went into the more technical aspects of the SNOT layout, but overall, it was a very organic, do-what-feels-right, rebuild the parts that aren't working sort of process to get to the finished product.

Thanks for asking (hopefully you're not regretting the question now :wink:)

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