Leonardo was the easiest Turtle to build. After building Donatello, I had the basic body style figured out, so it was just a matter of building the swords for him. I’d also previously designed katana based on the blade design of the scythe that I made for KAIKOKOTI, but I ended up deciding to use different pieces for the tsuba (those are the discs that serve roughly the same function as the crossguard on European swords). I suppose it’s fitting, as I always considered him the least interesting of the four Turtles. It’s not that I dislike him as a character, but rather that I find him to have the most predictable and straight-forward personality of the bunch.

For his pose, I decided that he should be leaping forward into battle. The short stubby arms and long sword blades made it pretty much impossible to do a cool sword-slashing pose like I would have prefered, so I arranged them like he was holding them out of the way to prevent them from getting tangled on anything that he was jumping past.