2019 parts Fest #2: Okkonen's Kekkonen and Tempietto

Finnish builder Eero Okkonen returns to our Parts Festival today for a fourth outing using new LEGO® parts. You can see his earlier builds here and follow his builds on his blog.

Portrait of the President

The person in the portrait is Urho Kaleva Kekkonen (1900-1986), the eighth president of Finland. His reign lasted from 1956 to 1982, over 25 years, which is unusual in democratic country that limits its president’s career to two six-year terms.
Kekkonen was known as a sportsman, fisherman and skier; something of an imposing figure over te whole of Finland for quarter a century.

 © 2014 savonsanomat

Kekkonen is also known for his quite caricature-like look; bald head and big, black-framed eyeglasses. The Medium Stone Grey/ Light Bluish Gray 3x3 dome reminded me instantly of Kekkonen’s bald head: the most iconic portraits of him are in black and white, so Medium Stone Grey was apt.  I made the head quite fast – in fact it was my first thing built for this Parts Festival.

The most interesting bit here might be the minifigure hands in Black used on the glasses; I like how they form the round dome part, distinguishing it from the more angular head area.

The head was on my table for a month, and several other builds were started and finished until I finally decided to complete it.

I wasn’t really interested in building the whole figure in a suit as it didn’t offer any fresh challenges. Fortunately an idea stuck me – make it a portrait!  I thought of using Brick Yellow/ Tan for the wall, but I wanted to use that hue in the frame (as birch) and realised a brighter shade would create a better contrast with the black and white portrait. I ended up using Bright Bluish Green/ Dark Turquoise.

The structure includes 6x6 bay, with walls forming gradient from black to white. The frame uses plenty of Batman bits from Mini Accessory, No. 11 in Silver Metallic (6266977|50018). The circular saws from this bag give the birch frame some heaviness. As there are two different saw pieces available, the frame is symmetrical.

Bramante’s Tempietto

This was a short "leisure build" one evening. I saw the post with Andreas Lenander’s Fat Boy rim and I was just hit by idea that it might be possible to build Bramante’s Tempietto using the motorcycle rim as the balcony.  In a way it feels a slight cheat to build parts festival builds inspired by parts festival builds, but there's no such thing as too many MOCs, right?

What exactly is Bramante’s Tempietto? Donato Bramante (1444-1514) was an Italian architect of the Renaissance period. He was associate of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, moved to Rome in 1499 and was commissioned to design a small temple – a tempietto – on the assumed site of Saint Peter’s crucifixion. Bramante’s design was small round building with two stories and dome roof, surrounded by a one-storey Doric colonnade.


The Fat Boy rim defined the size of the balcony, and a 6x6 round plate felt natural as a base for the inner structure. It also meant I could use four 3x3 quarter-dome parts to make the roof.  The first design used 1x1 round bricks stuck into the offset antistuds of a 6x6 round, but it looked wrong, and I adopted a very  pleasant design with macaroni bricks stuck into those offset antistuds with the concave edges facing outwards. The design was completed by the doorways and some SNOT on the sides.

The colonnade proved to be much harder; the main challenge was to have a circle of sixteen regularly spaced bars! I don’t know if there happens to be perfect piece for that, but I just ended up sticking them into a plate using some offset. The colonnade also lacks three pillars (I only had 13) and they’d be more realistic in grey but I only had white ones and they were okay.

I also capped the model with Batman’s bowl piece. There should be a cross on the top but I had no idea how to make a cross that small, as LEGO is not so keen on making religious elements.

READ MORE: Don't miss Peter Ilmrud's three varied builds for our Parts Festival: a gunship, a flying citadel and a hammam!

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