Udaar the Totally Tubular
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Using round and curved flat silver elements such as Technic macaroni, ziplines, and other various hoses, bushings and armor plates, Mitch evokes muscular, organic curves that you don’t often see made of LEGO. The minifig invisibility cloak used as a head frill, reminiscent of real-life animal adaptations used to confuse predators, aptly contributes to the confusion of its viewers.
Mitch is clearly enjoying this year’s LUGBulk purchase, a program where fans in officially recognized RLUGs (like local LEGO clubs for adults) can buy parts wholesale from LEGO to help them build amazing things. I had to reach out to Mitch to learn more about this build.
Grayson: Hey Mitch! Could you tell me a bit about yourself, like how you got into LEGO?
Mitch: I’m Mitch Phillips from Ontario, Canada, and have been building for as long as I can remember. The early Bionicles were really good for that because you could take them apart to make your own thing but could easily reassemble them from memory if you need to! This really allowed me to build my own things from the earliest days of getting into LEGO and Bionicle.
Grayson: What kinds of MOCs do you like? Have any other builders in the community inspired you?
Mitch: My favourite MOCs to build are creatures and characters but I really enjoy seeing all the styles of mocs out there; Spaceships and Castle builds are some of my favourite system styles of builds. When I was just getting started I spent hours and hours looking at builds from Retinence, Dviddy, Prhymus, Adrian Florea, Legohaulic, Nannan and so many more. It's a pretty cool part of the LEGO community that now I can call some of those giants my friends. I really love to see all the amazing builds that the community comes up with, they continuously inspire me to up my game! In general, I think builds that tell a story with the model itself really interest me. I try and create MOCs that feel like they could be a part of a larger world.
Grayson: Did you have any particular source(s) of inspiration for this MOC?
Mitch: For this build, I was really inspired initially by the parts! I had just received my LUGbulk order with a bunch of those macaroni parts in silver as well as the silver cable parts and round technic bushings. I came up with the chest area first, just by playing around trying to make interesting shapes with the macaroni. I thought maybe it could be a chest plate for a space warrior or something. At that point, I really sat on the build for a while trying to get some idea of what I wanted to make. The chest reminded me of H. R. Giger’s work so I thought that might be a good aesthetic to lean into.
Grayson: What was your build process like?
Mitch: The bulk of the build really came together surprisingly quickly for me. Sometimes I have MOCs that take years to build, other times it’s done over a weekend. That was the case here for whatever reason. I had been playing around with this type of body shape with my previous MOC Firedracax and wanted to see how a longer neck that slopes into the shoulders would look on a more mechanical monster.
Grayson: Were there any unexpected challenges?
Mitch: The krana for a face was actually a very late addition. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do for the face. I knew that I wanted the Harry Potter cape as an almost halo around its head but that was a nice combination to stumble upon! This is true with a lot of my MOCs, but the main structure of the MOC is actually really basic. I used an Inika torso and Vakhi hips for the main parts of the torso and the upper legs are 50898 (Technic bar with ball joint sockets) with friction addons on both sides. It’s often a really useful constraint to at least start your build using some of these standard types of components. Sometimes I’ll want to get a bit more detail into the model which I’m unable to do with the prefab parts previously mentioned. That’s when I’ll swap them out for a custom build design but more often than not they end up in my final build!
Grayson: Thanks for all the insight and for chatting with BrickNerd!
Can LEGO creations be considered action figures? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
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