The Best Dressed Bots on Sci-Fi Street
/When LEGO bots become the fashion, Marius Herrmann’s fashion bots will be trendsetters. These pant-wearing robots are carefully crafted with loads of clever part uses to discover! (Flickr | Instagram)
All nine of the fashion bots are eye-catching, but the Sentry “Peucaea” 10E-R made me take such a long second look, that I wanted to ask the builder some questions. And then I remembered that I contribute to BrickNerd, which is the perfect excuse for knocking on someone’s FlickrMail and making them roll their eyes again at how folks just don’t read descriptions these days!
Besides the creative use of official LEGO cloth pants, there are radios, BrickHeadz torsos, ice skates, and crutches to spot—to name a few of the “nice part uses.” I wanted to hear more about the pants especially, and Marius was kind enough to answer my questions!
Geneva: Where'd the idea of the pants-wearing robots come from? For the matter of that, where did the pants come from?!
Marius: The pants-wearing robot idea is something I had for quite some time. I always loved odd and unusual LEGO pieces. My earliest memories of playing with LEGO were building BIONICLE and my sister having a Scala playset. So I grew up with more exposure to LEGO parts that some might call “not real LEGO” than I had to classic bricks. Later, when I started building my own models I pretty much stopped collecting LEGO and instead only bought the specific parts I needed for a new model. With one exception: I always had a BrickLink wanted list full of all the Scala and Belville clothing. Every time I ordered parts, I also ordered all the cloth pieces the store had, which usually was zero to maybe one. :D But in 2019 I got a few Belville Jeans which then inspired the first fashion robot Tarsiger.
The pants and capes come from Belville, Scala and the large Star Wars Technic figures. Sialia’s dark azure jacket and Peucaea’s tan pants, for example, both came from the same set: 3158 Christian in Tough Wear. I actually bought that set because it was easier than finding the pants separately.
Geneva: How long did you spend on this bot? It’s super polished, really looks like every piece has a lot of thought behind it.
Marius: The building time for Peucaea wasn’t that long, only roughly one weekend. The entire design process was much longer, but it is difficult to say exactly how long because many of the design ideas had actually been created for previous fashion robots but were then scrapped. The rocket launcher, for example, was originally designed for Piranga, and the ingot armor was something I concepted for Eremalauda. These unused ideas then ended up on Peucaea. The two things that were completely original were the U-shaped body and the head. I probably spent most of my building time making sure that the transition between the curvature and the slopes was smooth.
R1-Officer "Tarsiger"
Geneva: I definitely thought the build time was longer, but it’s neat that you were able to make use of some previous “table scraps” from your other robots and make things come together faster. Which is your own favorite bot of the series?
Marius: Oh, it is difficult to choose a favourite, because I had a lot of fun making all of them. I really like Piranga cause it incorporates LEGO Gel Pens, a part I wanted to use for quite some time. But if I had to pick, I would say my favourites are still the original Tarsiger and Hirundo. Their design was lightning in a bottle. They just look the least like LEGO to me, which is exactly what I was trying to achieve. They set the bar for all subsequent fashion robot designs.
BU-5 "Hirundo" Interceptor
Returning to the Sentry “Peucaea” 10E-R, that robot—the ninth and for now final fashion bot—was based on this piece of concept art by Benjamin Last. And I definitely recommend checking out steponabrick.com/fashion where Marius goes into more fascinating detail about each of his robots!
Have you ever been inspired by a wacky, barely-LEGO brick? Let us know what you think in the comment section below!
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