Backlog posts! (and maybe proof of life? :p)
This mysterious black reFrame has always been a sign of ominous times.
Rumored to be a heavily custom unit of a pirate, the G Kurosawa has never been truly reported in any official logs as those who encounter it come back broken, muttering only the words “the black death comes”. Most believe it’s built around a Marzan Emissary design but vastly improved with various parts from the reFrames it has defeated.
Build notes:
This is a tribute build to a great custom designer toy maker named Quiccs and his awesome original character, the Ghost of Kurosawa. First time I saw his work, I immediately loved the whole aesthetic, combining the mecha genre (specifically the signature Gundam look) with medieval Japan and a generous amount of street / graffiti culture.
For this build, I spent quite some time tinkering with the head design, coming up with a look that had a creepy skull bug face and making sure I get the whole V-fin/samurai cresent in there. At some point, it reminded me of those enemy mobile suit head designs from V / F91 / Crossbone / G no Reconguista. Past the head, I didn’t really know how I’d translate Quiccs’s character’s look to my mecha format so I decided to just give it my own interpretation which ended up taking some visual cues from the X1 Crossbone Gundam (notable the back boosters and the grill on the sides of the shoulders from the Full Cloth).
The swords are actually Rapier versions of the ones the Emissary had but with Trans-clear blades (notice the finger guards using the vehicle mudguard).
Probably the hardest part of this entire build was adding those trapezoid front skirt flags.
Assembly notes:
The entire build started with creating the head since Quiccs’ design or signature look was mostly from the Gundam-ish helmet head design, tracksuit, and white sneakers. I badly wanted to get a skull look in here then cover that up nicely in a spherical helmet. Ended up using these antennae and got a bug-eye V Gundam enemy vibe (I forget the suit names but I do remember Chronicle Asher getting his rear whupped and his Shokew stolen :P) which I liked a lot.
The body build took quite a while since I had to reinterpret/reimagine what the body would look like in LEGO mech format. The source material doesn’t have a lot of detail with the body except for an illustration that had the original character wearing a kind of samurai retainer aesthetic and had spray paint cans attached to the side skirts.
A little more progress here. The character also commonly wears sweatpants or those balloon-ish MC Hammer parachute pants so this made me want to really thicken the quads and thighs then sleek it down with the shins.
The early version didn’t have those ankle guards and made the feet too wobbly during display since the ankles are on those Mixel ball joints. Notice that the arms have skeleton bones on it and that’s something I took from the original character. The original plan was to have the longer 5L bone there but it was too long and I’d have to extend the forearms by a stud and the proportions would be all weird.
Upon completion, I realized this had way too solid chunks of black parts, making it hard to differentiate the armor plating. If I’d rebuild this, I would probably create the inner frame pieces with a lighter color (LBG maybe?) just to have the armor pop out more. Overall, still liking this build a lot. Reminds me a lot of the V Gundam / Crossbone designs (who doesn’t like mecha space pirates? :P)
For those interested in LEGO mech building, I put out an eBook over at Amazon Kindle a while back called Mech Wars Instructional Primer. If you’re looking for a resource that could help you start or even improve your mech building skills, you might find this eBook useful
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