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1960 Cadillac Sedan DeVille Series 62. Basically the car I owe, but in ever awesome pink. This car is a cheater, every single pink brick was painted.
I painted each brick separate, some of them up and down, rather than spraying the whole body at once.
I know, shame on me, but this thing is only possible in white if you want to be "legal", and for this car I didn't care. I promise you that an Ecto 1 is on it's way and there I build everything out of existing bricks...

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Tags:   LEGO

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This is a WIP therefore the shitty pics, once I'm done I drag her out for some decent photoshoot.

A while ago I found the website of a guy that goes by the nick of Nico71 (nico71.fr) and that dude built a model of a Citroen 2cv (I say model though I think that LEGO creations are usually toys, but this one is special), and since I owned one of these things for a while I thought that rebuilding it using detail pics he provided was a great exercise.

A way to learn some Technic and switch from stacking to clipping for a bit. Especially because I think that the looks, proportions and overall feel of the real car was so brilliantly captured in this model. Yes, it is by far the best LEGO 2cv out there regardless the scale, and it happens to be a Technic model... Out of liftarms and panels. A medium that I consider almost useless for my own building as my mind can't wrap around the idea how you build such complex shape not stacking, not even mentioning the fact that it requires ridiculous ammount of planing ahead...

Anyway, the fact that this thing had all those features the real car has, like the floppy trailing arm suspension, the special gearbox, the floppiness of the car (yes, the real hood is just as wobbly) was the icing on the cake, and all that caused lots of trouble for me, f.ex the gearbox, Nico made 2 pics and I guess they are self explanatory for someone who builds Technic, for me it was a pain since I had to figure out what's inside and identify the bricks used, some of which I have never seen before... Most of the components were such a guessing game, especially because the things were photographed in sub sections and mostly required disassembling to be put on. Some stuff were illogical for me, like two pairs of axles with a stop that stuck out the whole time, where I thought it's a mistake, but these would hold the body in place and need to be pushed in at the very end. Like I said, obvious for Technic guys, a guessing game for me...

Anyway.

I built Citroen, first just like Nico built it, just to understand the logic behind it, then I built just the body in light gray as I found it's a more correct 2cv color, but soon I was annoyed by the pins in different colors, so I partially disassembled and painted the whole body light blue to to match the 2cv I owned.
I changed just tiny details of the original design to match my car, the doors had no reason to be this Charleston design, changed the orientation of the door handles, added the chevron in the front grille, made the mirrors and wipers, and of course the mudflaps. I used some 2x4 dishes in chrome that a friend made for me since I was cheating with the paint anyhow. I will tweak some things and make some stickers that my real car had, like the club sticker on the back, numberplates and some mooneyes that I had on my car...

Didn't take the Charleston body apart, so I will build another chassis someday and I think I spray the red bits dark red like the real car has as a good friend of mine who is working with me comes from France and asked if he can have one for himself...

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Now. If you don’t know who Ed ”Big Daddy” Roth is, then you shall Google it. This man is the single biggest inspiration for me. My art, cars, drawings, paintings, MOCs, whatever is strongly influenced by what this guy did. This whole world of Hot Rods, Kustoms, Choppers wouldn’t be the same without that man.

The Rat Fink is surely one of his most notorious characters, and was a kind of anti Mickey Mouse, a figure that I can’t stand, therefore it’s easy for me to like this filthy green rodent.

The build was a pain. It took forever. This guy was literally years in making. I knew pretty long time ago that I’d use the BELVILLE plates for ears, I had those green safety rings set aside since I developed the SPONGE BOB FLYING DUTCHMAN, feet were lying around since early 2010 and so on.
The actual kickstart for building it was the appearance of a pic of a new LEGO Line, the Mixels. The eyes on my R.F. were for quite a bit made out of lever bases and looked awful. Now, one of those Mixels features a printed voodoo ball as eyes, and that seemed more than obvious.
I just drew two dots on a plain white ball, and went from there.
It took the better part of three months to build his face, half plate offsets, “bending” bricks, uneven connections, all that just to get the face “right”. The Rat Fink has something about thim, the silhouette, the slightly tipped head, I don’t know exactly what the hell makes him “Fink”… In the end it seemed to be slight things like blacking out the bricks in the mouth, shortening teeth in the front, adding a “tilt” to his ears, shortening the snout, lowering the head as much as I could, and trying to get the eyes as close to each other as possible…

I did’t entirely succeed in building the expression on his face I intended. I mean he’s fun, there are a gazillion drawings, sculpts, toys, compared to them he's as R.F. As he can be or more, but I have this one from Revell on my mind, and although he seems fine to most people he's not exactly the way I wanted, but for now I feel I did the best I could with the elements given and ideas I had.

The eyes from Mixels are not available yet.
My plan was to wait until April, but since I painted the dome for his belly anyway, I figured I do the same with the eyes, the base was spraypained using a mask, just a plain dot basically, and then the I added different blue shades, and a black dot using a brush and acrylics from citadel. At the end a spot with a white Edding, done. One set of the eyes features some bloody veins, but I don’t know about that just yet. Might be an overkill, then I could have also painted the hair on his ears and whatnot. The dot and the R.F. are in places LEGO elements would be printed anyway...

I also spraypained quite some elements again, the Rat Fink can’t be built in any known color as far as I am concerned. Best would be this “middle green”, but there are no bricks avaliable I could use, and it's odd when I paint an entire surface without at least mixing in some elements in actual color...

Some bricks were spraypainted over white, they seem to match the original colors way better. Actually to the point where you can’t tell what was painted, especially on the green guy because the spray has more shine to it, but stuff like the hinges and those BELVILLE plates I had just in very dark colors, what made me spray them many times, and therefore this strange dark shade.
Because of the painting the Hands on the green guy can’t be moved without damaging the surface. I tried Bricklink for strange colors, but the voodoo ball in green is something that will have to happen. Of course, this ain’t gonna be taken apart anytime soon, and I will try to replace the bricks as they come out. Maybe.

There are many literations of the Rat Fink, I made two. The green is the most popular, the grey version is inspired by the box art of the Revell kit from the 60es. I made that one because it seemed easier to find a certain “feel” of his face while using gray bricks. The green seems too dark, so I couldn’t really decide on contrasts, especially with the “grin” where that mudguard piece makes this finky curve. Funny enough, I had one in dark grey that was spraypainted just on the outside sitting there for forever, and so the inside of his mouth was dark. For the pics I painted a white brick very thorough and this shade disapeared...

That's it... I guess. I never write so much about my stuff because I never care. Built. That's it. I don't do notes, writedowns, it's rare that I even think while building. I laugh at people who talk about flow, shapes, balance, beauty and stuff like that. I build toys.
But this one was important enough to share some thoughts...

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