This is Kiki, the ferret from Sluggy Freelance . I started reading this comic because a friend of mine, who actually got a cameo in one strip, suggested it to me. Well, actually, I started reading it because he said he was actually in one of the strips (but he never told me which one). By the time I tracked down the specific strip , I’d become a regular reader.

While I’m more fond of some of my earlier MOCs, I think it probably ranks as one of the best pieces I’ve done to date. The idea first dawned on me when I realized that I could link four POHATU torsos together to form a decent base for a ferret body, and the introduction of both brown BOHROK limbs and brown socket joints would help out for the legs. Then I remembered that only Kiki’s belly is brown. So much for that idea, right? Well, not quite. I used the torso string as a base, but I had to swap all the leg parts out for black ones, and a recent purchase gave me the sudden inspiration for how to make the tail. After that, I had to figure out a way to completely cover the top and sides of the torso with black parts, but without making it too fat looking. This is where the real challenge started. I ended up deciding that the smallest TECHNIC® panels would be the easiest place to start. Not quite. Each pair ended up having to be attached in a completely different way to allow for the contour of the torso. After that, some of them had to be adjusted so I could add filler pieces to the resulting gaps. Even then it still didn’t look like a smooth enough curve, and at least one pair was able to twist slightly. Linking a pair of the crinkle-tubes together and running them through both sides of the panel sets solved both of those problems, but again required some tweaking of previous assemblies to allow clearance for the tubes.

So, the body was done. That was the easy part, and it took less than a day to finish. Now I had to figure out how to make a white head with white ears and black patches around blue eyes. I had recently bought a bunch of minifig gems, and two of the light-blue ones conveniently had large bubbles right in the center that gave the illusion of pupils in eyes. Again, TECHNIC panels proved to be the solution for the black patches. One of my most convoluted and twisty constructions ever was required to fill out the white parts of the head. The basic shape was completed on the same day as the rest of the body, but I wasn’t really happy with it. I’ve been letting it sit around for a couple months as I keep going back and trying slight variations on the design to fill out specific places a bit more (especially the top of the head, which originally was half as wide as it is now). The final result is a head that is ball-jointed at the neck, ears that are ball-jointed at the base, and a mouth that can actually be opened. Well, it’s also ball-jointed, so it can be spun around, flipped upside down, and generally put into some really disturbing poses, but it’s the only easy way for me to pose it in the two possitions that I’d wanted, and I even figured out a way to make the inside of the mouth red so it’s more visually interesting.