Lothiar Westlander WIP
March 16th, 2009Lothiar Westlander is a wizard from the same world that Rhianwyn comes from. I started working on him about the same time I started on Agent Prime. Historically, Lothiar has been giving me no end of fits. He needed a wig, so I got one. Guh. Also, the headsculpt on the Malcolm Parks figure I picked out for him kept throwing me for loops.
When I first got him, I wasn’t very happy. He didn’t quite look the way I had seen him on the website I bought him from. I guess it was the way he was lit that got me. No matter what kind of light I looked at him in, something was off. While stewing over the matter some time ago, I looked at him one more time in his then new duds, by lamp light. His folds, shadows and wrinkles really jumped out. Then I thought about his backstory, how every piece of clothing and everything he carries mean something. Why he looks the way he does. Things started coming together and a lot of the anxiety went away.
The hair, of course, is the major sticking point right now. Second would be his sword. I thought I knew what I wanted, but when I had something in hand, I changed my mind. Several times. These are some of ones I’ve bought:
The top one is Mononofu. The middle one is from a DiD samurai figure. The bottom is from Hot Toys Elizabeth Swann. I wanted something that fell between the swords Men in my world carry (your typical broadswords and hand-and-a-half swords) and what the Kindred, the “elf” incarnations, carry (curved swords with long hilts). For the first sword, the round hand guard sets it apart. The second’s curve I like, but I want to give it a longer hilt. The third one could work, looking exotic, but I really don’t like the very thin plastic blade. I think I’m spoiled by metal blades; Rhianwyn has one, and the first two swords in the pic are metal.
Maybe I might pick up something I’ve had my eye on for a while: a Mononofu samurai sword that comes unassembled with a full tang blade, so I can build whatever kind of hilt I want around it.