Blackwedged Butterflyfish

Hello, fellow builders! It been way too long since I've done my last product idea. Enough waiting! I present to you the Black Wedged Butterfly fish! Of course, if you're a biologist, you may prefer the term Bep chaetodon falcula! 🤓

I was actually inspired by a marine biology course to make this build. It was pretty cool building this model with a relatively good understanding of the structures I was making. Previously, I made whole coral reefs without any real understanding of what coral polyps were, for example. (not that you have to know what coral polyps are 😅). It made the process even more fun.

I've always had a fascination with ocean life and have enjoyed trying to replicate these beautifully designed creatures with bricks, but I've never tried to make them as accurate as I did here. Though I could not perfectly capture the real shape of the fish's patterns, I'm pretty satisfied with the result. If you look closely at the pictures, you can see that the fish's patterns were made by a combination of plates, modified bricks, brackets, inverted arches, and curved slopes. As you can imagine, this took a lot of time to get all of these components to fit together and leave no seams behind. It was definitely a type of building style that I don't often use and I hope to do similar concepts in the future. (The over all length of the fish is 20 studs or roughly 6.25 in. I guess he's still young!😉)

The coral reef section was also fun to design. I thought that using the flower and star pieces on the corals made the them look more real and detailed. The sea star was simple, but fun to make. I chose the colored because I thought it made it recognizable and complimented the other colors nicely. I used hinges at the bases of the big rock and one of the corals to give them a natural slant. I enjoyed building this and hope to do more projects like it! See you next time!