Maneki Neko
I love the Japanese culture. There are so many cool things about it, including the Beckoning Cat, Maneki Neko. The beckoning cat is a good luck charm, bringing people (with the left paw raised) or fortune (with the right paw raised) to your home or business. The Maneki Neko also holds a Koban, which is a gold coin of Edo-era Japan.
When I started building the Maneki Neko, I started with the head. Because the eyes needed a particular look to them, they are plates at a 90 angle from the rest of the head. The ears presented another challenge, as I like to minimize the amount of slopes for building the main model and use them more for accents. I could not get the ears working with regular plates, so I ended up using slopes.
His body was fairly easy, but it did require some rebuilding after the prototype was done. The arms were designed to be changed if someone wants a right beckoning Maneki Neko instead of a left Maneki Neko. Technic pins and bricks are wonderful things :-)
The chest and bib pretty much stayed the same as the prototype. A technic pin is holding the bell, a round 2x2 tile in place. The biggest problem initially was positioning the bell so it is was directly below the collar.
The feet and tail were added to the body after the body was finished. The body was originally just more of an egg shape. It required a few rebuilds to add the feet, as well as make them more rounded, to get them right. The tail is very simple, with some slopes to give it the right angle as Maneki Neko's tail seems to be small and curved a bit.
The left arm, the beckoning one, took only a couple of tries to get right. The biggest issues was getting it rounded and rebuilding it with the technic brick so it could be plugged into the shoulder. For more support, a tile was added to the top of the bottom legs to support the arms a little more than just the technic pins.
The right arm, the one holding the coin, required the most work of anything in the sculpture. If you look at Maneki Neko, you can see that he's holding the Koban at an angle. Also, the Koban has to be able to support itself on an angle, with a little help from the paw.
Russ came up with the idea (he saves me again :-) with having the coin-holding paw plugged into the arm with a technic pin so it can rotate freely. This enables the coin to be balanced against the paw while staying on an angle.
The coin itself took a couple of builds to get right. The first problem was getting the Kanji (Japanese characters) into the smallest size possible so that the Maneki Neko could hold it and it could still be read. The other problem was proportions. The initial attempt looked like someone had stepped on the characters.
Some stats: about 8 inches tall, lots of white plates and some bricks, and my best guessimate is around 500-800 pieces.