Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily merrily,
Life is but a dream.
Built for Bio-Cup 2025.
Prelims Theme: Dreams
Alt Main Photos:
The Stream:
Turn that boat around! :
Designer’s Notes:
… I am still so tired. Hi! Welcome to my last minute entry into this year’s Biocup! About four hours were left on the clock before I got this in and it was late enough for me that my body was quivering from fatigue while trying to take the photos.
If you’ve read the Biocup topic, then you know I had some trouble with this year’s Prelims theme. I usually have trouble with Biocup prompts as they’re just too vague for me, but dreams was extra hard. Especially when I made a bed monster in 2019 that would have been perfect for it. And my brain wouldn’t consider Sandman, because I already did a modern drug dealer version for an RP and have already built two MOCs with umbrellas. Overdone, overplayed, or too obvious…But I needed direction somewhere.
I considered a couple of ideas, all of which I only had two hours this past Sunday to try. The “Dream Big” goldfish wearing a shark fin - didn’t happen because there is already a perfect constraction goldfish. Perhaps one of the Biblical dreams/visions like Pharaoh seeing skinny cows eating fat cows, grain eating grain - honestly, too difficult for me to do with constraction at a reasonable scale. What about a rendition of the cover for one of my most favorite books of all time, Hope for the Flowers? I might still do that one day, maybe not constraction based, but didn’t have the parts I needed to get the colors right. Nor did I have the colors for St. Trina of Elden Ring, as I did consider her and several other Fromsoftware sleepy characters.
Alright, so subject matter isn’t working. What about parts? There are those 2006 Bionicle playset baseplates I’ve been wanting to build something with and one side looks like teeth. We could go with the prophetic vision approach and have a mountain ripping open its mouth to reveal something inside. Maybe lava. Maybe there’s some music box motif in there and a dancing lava lady is inside. Have black tendrils coming out of the head for smoke spearing birds. . . This is as far as I got:
That’s the Lego City parachute inside there. I do have the orange one, but it still has the plastic bits attached. Didn’t feeling like dismantling that without testing the plastic-free blue chute. It worked…but the mountain mouth was too small of an opening, even for a little lady. So rather than a dancing lady rising out of the lava, with the parachute making up part of the dress, I had considered it just filling up the entire middle section, as seen in the photo. Maybe some sort of weird mouth? I couldn’t get anything to work in a satisfactory way, so I abandoned it.
I was pretty sure that this was it and I wouldn’t enter Biocup this year…But when as I was finishing my exercises before bed, that nursery rhyme came to mind. Surely, a rowboat or some sort of boat would be simple enough to build and a water way. And two hours later, we got the boat and stream. I spent too much time trying to figure out how to reuse the mountain mouth + waterfall combo to give the entry something more. I still think something is missing, but not sure what.
There was going to be an anchor as well, which is why there’s the fishing string coming out of the eye. But couldn’t figure out something small enough to work in the scale. I easily spent half an hour debating on what to use for the sails and what looked best. I think the sails are fine, but they’re just a tad too small. I had to mentally square it away as them being partially rolled up. I almost used the Rotor/Meltdown/Thunder shield piece as a sail, but couldn’t get that to be positioned correctly.
The body of the boat was pretty easy. I already had in mind several different masks that could work and was messing around with them when I found the Kraahkan and Tuma combo. It wasn’t rowboat, but it did solve the issue of building a small person the what to use for the paddle.
I also briefly considered making a coffin going down the river as well. Skeleton lazily paddling along as a sort of ironic twist, but felt it was unnecessary.
And I believe that’s everything! As always, comments and criticism are always welcome.