Finally, another character from this list, and one I’ve admittedly been dreading. It’s…
Johmak
Shame such a cool ability was wasted on such a nothing-burger character, but I still had a lot of fun designing her. Consisting of 149 pieces, everything except for the hands and the feet are completely custom. I started from, of all things, a Vahki torso, a piece that is considered notoriously difficult to use in mocs. This time was no different, but after some trial and error, a couple thin L-shape liftarms and a 7L liftarm with alternating-direction pin holes did the trick.
I was worried how I was going to convey Johmak’s crystalline nature. I instinctively gravitated toward trans-brown (old trans-black), but I had no idea what I would do with it since the majority of parts that were made in that color were some kind of window/windscreen. I was pleasantly shocked to see that this small panel and its twin also come in that color, prompting me to find a way to attach them to the chest. As you can see, I made liberal use of trans-brown Bohrok eyes; 12 in total, 6 of which are on her back.
Her head is probably the thing I struggled the most on. I knew from the word go that I wanted to use the black Gali mask, but how to attach it was very tricky. Ultimately, after some suggestions from friends, I took a page from Guardian’s book and plugged the head into a thin liftarm. Interestingly, the eyes are only plugged in with one 1/2-pin each. Of course, I could just use inverted slopes and plug them directly into the connector, but that would result in the teeth being concave side out, and I was told it would look better this way.
The agent behind the slaughter?
One last thing I considered doing was rendering her in purple as a cute little reference to BionicleChicken, who colors her purple in their art because their style “makes a canon-accurate ebony-colored Johmak hard to distinguish.” Unfortunately Lego’s so-called dark purple is too bright in my opinion for this kind of thing to work, and I’m not currently aware of any color packs with any darker shades.
