Heroic Shaana

Meet Shaana, the heroic warrior fighting against monsters and evil-doers everywhere! 

This is an original character made to feel at home in any fantasy styled story. The details may differ, but the basics remain: a strong woman, armed with a two-handed sword and with a bone-headed sense of justice.

I've built many of my own custom minifigures, but with the improvements and possibilities introduced with Mixels and the new joints, I wanted to build a giant-sized, highly posable figure. While there are several lines of bigger, articulated figures like Hero Factory and Bionicles, they tend to focus on playability. I wanted to see how much detail I could cram into a figure in this scale, although she did end up bigger than existing designs. She is fairly durable, but at this scale she would need a better designer than me to stand up to actual play. The idea here is for a display model.

For the build, only existing pieces were used, although many of them are rare and currently out of print. I briefly used standard orange wedge pieces for the shoulder pads, but I fell in love with the bulky parts from Knights Kingdom II (2004). I used lots of silver parts which were available in the Agents (2008) theme to add a lovely, realistic sheen to her armour. The only part that simply wasn't available was the ball on the sword hilt: I would have wanted it in blue. Some parts also literally turned up in the last second: the dark orange slopes on her waist were introduced in a 2015 Star Wars set...

Points of articulation include ankles, knees, hips, neck, shoulders, upper arms, elbows, wrists and individual fingers. Also, the skirt and shoulder pads are on hinges to allow more posing, and both the front braids and the long hair have multiple joints to flow better.