Blocky Bakemono: Umibozu
During my breaks at LEGO, I'll be taking some time to familiarize myself with the stunningly large selection of LEGO pieces that they have stored here in order to try my hand at crafting a variety of bakemono in this medium. I'm not guaranteeing success; I'm sure some of my entries are going to be feeble submissions, but I'm bound to improve over time. At my current rate, I'm looking at about 1 or 2 per month and I will only post finished pieces with some commentary on the critter and a bit of a postmortem on the building process.
My first entry is the dreadful sea monster, the umibozu.
The umibozu is often represented as completely black with a large but vague humanoid shape. The eyes have been reported to be horrible orange discs, crimson mirrors, or dull white circles. It emerges from the sea to drown fishermen and sailors, but can be either avoided or warded off (depending on the story). What is predominantly believed to be a drowned monk reborn as a vengeful sea spirit, it also has comparisons to giant squid as it has been described as using long tentacles to destroy ships. Whatever it is, it should be avoided at all costs.
Focusing on the sheer size of the monster, I chose to focus only on the front half of the head as the staring, dead eyes were probably the first thing that caught my attention. The poor, panicking LEGO man in the boat is hopelessly doomed, but he does serve the purpose of offering a great sense of scale for this beast. My original version had the umibozu much smaller and leaner, but the arms I gave him were far too angular, so I scaled it back to just his head.
Brick-wise, it's a nearly solid piece of smaller black bricks. I tried to use both larger pieces and empty framework blocks (think of a 4x4x1 square brick with the middle four pegs omitted) so that it wasn't as dense. However, it still turned out to be a laborious piece. You can find my inspiration piece and some extra info by following the links below.
http://www.obakemono.com/image/00000000032/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umib%C5%8Dzu
This was the right monster to start with as I learned quite a bit just by working on this piece and it was a very simple monster to visualize. I think I saw some awesome bits for a kappa along the shelves, so that one may be next.
My first entry is the dreadful sea monster, the umibozu.
The umibozu is often represented as completely black with a large but vague humanoid shape. The eyes have been reported to be horrible orange discs, crimson mirrors, or dull white circles. It emerges from the sea to drown fishermen and sailors, but can be either avoided or warded off (depending on the story). What is predominantly believed to be a drowned monk reborn as a vengeful sea spirit, it also has comparisons to giant squid as it has been described as using long tentacles to destroy ships. Whatever it is, it should be avoided at all costs.
Focusing on the sheer size of the monster, I chose to focus only on the front half of the head as the staring, dead eyes were probably the first thing that caught my attention. The poor, panicking LEGO man in the boat is hopelessly doomed, but he does serve the purpose of offering a great sense of scale for this beast. My original version had the umibozu much smaller and leaner, but the arms I gave him were far too angular, so I scaled it back to just his head.
Brick-wise, it's a nearly solid piece of smaller black bricks. I tried to use both larger pieces and empty framework blocks (think of a 4x4x1 square brick with the middle four pegs omitted) so that it wasn't as dense. However, it still turned out to be a laborious piece. You can find my inspiration piece and some extra info by following the links below.
http://www.obakemono.com/image/00000000032/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umib%C5%8Dzu
This was the right monster to start with as I learned quite a bit just by working on this piece and it was a very simple monster to visualize. I think I saw some awesome bits for a kappa along the shelves, so that one may be next.