As I’m sure everyone is aware by now, the Canon Contests have come to a premature close on account of Greg Farshtey’s announcement that he is departing from the Lego Group effective July 2022. As disappointed as I am what this means for the contests (mainly that everything has just stopped before I got my chance to have fun), I’m not going to spend too much more time moping about it–I’m not going to stop creating because of this, not by a long shot–instead, I’m going to make one big post compiling everything I’ve made for these contests to date.
Toa Tuyet
I’ve already made a properly-formatted post explaining the ins and outs of this model, so I’m not going to go fully in-depth with it again, but designing Tuyet was a fun challenge and I’m glad she came out the way she did. Were the contest to go on, I would keep the shark shoulder pads after the fact regardless of the results. They’re kind of signature to her imo.
Toa Nidhiki
When designing this model, I neither knew of the supposed rule about the presence of silver armor in Nidhiki’s color scheme nor cared about it once I found out. I excluded silver for one reason and one reason only: I wanted this model to stand out from other Nidhiki MOVs that are more-or-less forced to use silver because Lego only ever produced the Volitak in that color.
Since I elected to forgo silver, I needed another color to complement the dark green. Lime green is simply too bright for what I wanted Nidhiki to be. Mata green could’ve worked to compliment Tuyet’s Mata blue, but most of these pieces don’t actually exist in Mata green. Since Nidhiki is the type of character to use the shadows to his advantage, I decided sand green would work well (even though it did lead to annoyances ordering his parts to build him irl. Thanks Artakha). I was reluctant to use black at first, but the further up I built, the more sense black made in Nidhiki’s color scheme so I just kept it.
His mask is a Kualsi because 1) I subscribe to the headcanon that he reforged its shape to trick his opponents and 2) the Kualsi is actually made in dark green.
Lariska, the Wise, Wonderful, and Gloriously Homicidal
I think it should go without saying that this MOC was very challenging to design. Recap: The color teal was retired from Lego’s part inventory around 2002 and didn’t make a comeback until 2018, roughly when CCBS stopped really being a thing. Undeterred by this, I took on the challenge of making a purist model of Lariska. Every teal piece you see here actually comes in teal.
Admittedly, neither the head nor the torso are entirely my own. I can’t remember where the head originated from, but the torso is based on that of WCP’s Rei, Toa of Peace; I made more changes to design the closer to the shoulders I got, both out of necessity (remember I was going for purist) and out of design preference.
I never got around to making a proper render of Lariska and Nidhiki together for a height comparison, but I have played around with both in Studio and I know that she is a fair bit taller as a girlboss should be. This may not be entirely accurate but I like it so I’m keeping it. Not every Bionicle figure was properly in scale with each other anyway.
Toa Zaria
Honestly not much has changed about any of the Yesterday Crew since the last time you saw them, with Zaria getting the most significant changes; the first of which being I swapped out his sword and shield for a staff (btw, I imagine this like a bo staff that he can manipulate the shape any way he needs). The second change involves changing the colors of some parts (namely dark bluish grey to gunmetal grey). This is one that you probably wouldn’t know about unless it was pointed out to you but one that has driven me absolutely crazy since I found out why I had to do it in order to stay purist. I’ll leave that little rant in a dropdown so you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.
Why I Changed Some Liftarms from DBG to GMG
So that first render of Zaria uses two dark bluish grey 2L thick liftarms. Little did I know at the time, these parts are exclusive to the 2018 Range Trooper set, one of the last of the Star Wars CCBS figures, and he only had one. This part is so rare that, at any given time, there are almost no listings on Bricklink (there are none as of the time this post goes up). The easiest way you can acquire 2 of these parts is if you bought two whole Range Troopers. What makes this recolor even more perplexing and aggravating is that this recolor didn’t even need to be made. Seriously, look at the instructions. A 2L thick liftarm with axle hole could’ve worked just fine in that location, and those are common in DBG. Why would Lego make a new recolor for a set that didn’t need it and then proceed to never release it again despite how useful it could be? To get around this problem, I changed the liftarms from DBG to gunmetal grey, but it’s mindboggling how this ever became a problem in the first place. smh
Toa Chiara
Again, basically nothing has changed here. Though now that we’re here, it’s kind of funny in hindsight that I talked about how I disliked how other people shoehorned silver into Nidhiki’s color scheme on account of the Volitak only ever being made in silver when I did exactly that for Chiara. Oops?
Toa Orde
Orde is the last of the MOCs that I would consider finished and he’s easily the strangest. I wanted the Yesterday Crew to have different base constructions (Zaria->Inika, Chiara->Metru, Orde->Mata/Nuva), which wasn’t too difficult to pull off for the former two, but Orde proved challenging on account of most of the parts I was looking for simply being nonexistent in medium blue, a color I’ve chosen to associate with Psionics since it’s the closest thing to “azure” (the shade used to describe Varian) we have in G1.
The result meant that Orde has incredibly beefy legs relative to the rest of his body, which is essentially just a recolored Toa Nuva with wrist gauntlets. Frankly, I think there’s a certain charm about his appearance, so I’m not sure I would’ve attempted to fix the proportions were the contests able to continue. It was very difficult remaining purist as it is (even now, most of these parts in these colors are not easy to get a hold of in large quantities). The only non-purist part of this whole model is the Makooti mask.
Toa Varian
Admittedly, this is a very anticlimactic note to end on. Varian has no proper render because she was not complete as of the time of the announcement that the contests would close, and I’ve not felt the motivation to finish her since. Other than the mask, the torso, and the shield, I believe that this model is purist so far. I tried a lot of ways to get her elbow blades to work but none were really to my liking. This design using these gold beast claws is the best one to date but I still don’t like it. Frankly, this is where Varian struggled the most and where I need to direct most of my attention should I ever return to the drawing board.
As stated, this model should be purist apart from three things which I believe had to change: the mask (obviously), the shield (it should match her armor if she’s styled like a Hagah), and the Metru torso (I needed that light blue in there. A dark blue torso did not suffice).
I never began projects for the Golden Skinned Being or Marendar, but I had ideas for what I wanted the latter to be (specifically, I wanted a transformer). With that in mind, I’m sure you’re wondering: what’s with the “Part 1” in the title? Well, since the contests ended prematurely, Eljay and Meso decided to release the list of characters for the planned second round of contests prematurely, several of whom I’d already made MOCs of in the past. Those characters will be featured in “Part 2” soon enough.
