I voted for short legs, by the way. But I am just as open to the idea of the Matoran being the same height as the Toa. This is me trying to play devil’s advocate.
My suggestion for an approach towards designing the Matoran is to make it clear they have different priorities in comparison to the Toa. Instead of trying to come up with a catch-all look, the Matoran could have slightly more unique designs depending on the environment. Matoran can be soldiers (like the two to the left here), merchants, fishermen, tailors, etc (Costume design instead of creature design). In other words, what would a cook look like in comparison to Iron Man?
Here, the soldiers are wearing armor that’s visibly worn out, mostly colorless, and less detailed than Tahu’s body. Not all Matoran have to be that way, but they’d clearly not be the ones going out on adventures. Narmoto and Jaller are elaborations on the base Matoran. Still a little bland in terms of color scheme, but clearly a little more important. A way of showing that “special” Matoran can still look less powerful than a Toa.
If it’s worth avoiding the legs discussion, these ideas could still maybe work with Hobbit legs. Please don’t kill me.
Personally I’d prefer them all having a red primary colour to have something clearly unifying them under one element - though I’m one of those people that liked how homogenised the Matoran were in G1, so that might not be a popular opinion.
My idea of making the Matoran look ‘inferior’ to Toa was giving them less complex printing and more solid and perhaps occasionally lighter colours, which I see has been done a little here.
Nice work with these, though. They certainly look like lesser versions of Toa, but whether it goes far enough given the regular-sized legs is debatable.
Why do Jaller and Narmoto look to me as if they’re those two characters in every movie who provide most of the humour? (Like R2-D2 & C-3PO or Thomson & Thomson.)
Pretty nice. I’m not sure if I like Jaller having a greater emphasis on black in his color scheme, but it works extraordinarily well for the soldiers. It really adds a formidable, battle worn presence to them- almost as if they’ve been ashened from copious fiery battles.
I really like the color distribution here; it’s the most effective way to distinguish long legged matoran from Toa that I’ve seen thus far.
Everyone says “oh, well just make the prints less complex” but that really doesn’t have enough visual impact… and perhaps even makes it harder to tell. To elaborate, Matoran with less complex prints have larger blobs of color, thus more points of bright contrast and a cleaner look- which are also used in certain cases to make characters more distinct. But this is mitigated majorly when there are just less really bright colors to speak of.
Well they look neat, but still dont think that the complete monochrom idea is good, would be more hinder it.
They could have just one or two “element colors” on them as side colors for the grey and black main part, but anyone havent noticed that the toa are mostly just they element color ? The black and gray by them more looks like a accent color then a main part, so why not switch it by the matoran? Make gray and black the main color and the element ones just accents. Like by a fire one orange and red being accent colors, but not just some small blobs, more like plates or hands and mask being in the element color, other parts in the grey and black ones.
I had an idea of how making the minifig and battle packs possible, with out making too much work, one line: random and mix and matching. I explain, the idea is simple, making some prints for feet, torso and too arms, then randomly printing these sets of prints on minifigs, with set color “combos” like for fire matoran: yellow and orange, orange and red, red and scarlet and so on. This idea is possible too for the other element matorans, hey they could have different front arm colors ! Just based on they element.
They certainly look like lesser versions of Toa, but whether it goes far enough given the regular-sized legs is debatable.