Beach

My very first diorama built for public display was a little seaside town called Minotaur Bay. Before Minotaur Bay, there was just a beach.

It all started with blue and yellow bricks on a 32x32 baseplate, with a few white plates outlining "waves". There are no photographs of this first version, but after swapping out bricks for plates it essentially ended up as the area marked out in the red square below.

Taylor

Another minifigure customised to make a sci-fi reference. This time it's astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) from Planet of the Apes.

The body is Series 11's "Barbarian" with the angry face from Series 6's "Highland Battler".

"You maniacs! You blew it up!"

Merry Christmas!

Here's a little scene I put together for a Star Wars Christmas MOC competition. It's called "Christmas Tree Shopping".

Who needs an an axe when you have a lightsaber?

MacReady

Here's the next mix-n-match recreation of a movie character in minifigure form. This time it's J. R. MacReady from 1982's The Thing.

In this case the legs and torso are one of the pilots from the Arctic range of City sets, and I just had to find a bearded face and longish brown hair to complete the minifigure. The props took a little more work. A torch, a hose and a small "neck bracket" were the main ingredients in my mini flamethrower.

Below is a reference picture I found online, showing MacReady with his flamethrower backpack, and sticks of explosive strapped to his jacket. These were represented by the red stick of dynamite, found in several Lego Mining sets.

Mosaics

I recently started my first foray into Lego mosaics. I don't have the bricks (or the money) for giant wall-sized ones, so I'm starting smaller. On a 32x32 baseplate, to be exact.

At that scale, large images don't translate well down into 1024 total "pixels". A 32 x 32 baseplate is 10 inches square, and an LP cover is 12 inches. So I'm also starting smaller with my mosaic sources. The baseplate covers 70% of the area of an album cover, so the artwork is (mostly) recognisable when reduced down to a highly pixelated version.

Below are two work-in-progress examples.

Snake Plissken

Here's the next in my series of mix-n-match efforts to create movie characters in minifigure form. This time it's Snake Plissken, as played by Kurt Russell in 1981's Escape from New York.

"Call me Snake."

Most of the parts (arms, hair, torso) were easy to source, being plain colours. I didn't have any Pirate sets at the time, so had to get some in order to get the bearded face with an eyepatch. I borrowed the legs from one of my Star Wars Kashyyyk Troopers, whose uniforms are very similar to modern army camouflage.

Chinese Restaurant

When it comes to the Ninjago theme, I'm not a fan of the vehicle sets. The buildings are a different story, and I recently built 70728 Battle for Ninjago City. I love the colour combinations of red, gold and dark green.

I have a couple still in the box, with future plans for a large medieval Japanese display. With no room to display it on my shelves, I dismantled the set I'd just built, and then set to work on making a Chinese restaurant instead.

After a lot of trial and error, and some building and re-building, I ended up with the building below.

Micro Millennium Falcon

When I took my Sphinx MOC along to a local LUG meet, I was challenged to add a little something to make it "cooler" - a tiny Millennium Falcon doing a fly-by.

As soon as I got home that night, I grabbed my collection of grey parts and came up with this micro-scale Millennium Falcon and TIE fighter.

Micro Sphinx

I recently attended a local LUG meeting which featured a MOC competition with the theme "Animals". I took that theme in a mythical direction!

I didn't win a prize, but got some great comments. I used a lot of small plates, bricks and slopes, aiming for an asymmetrical look. I wanted the appearance of something ancient, and partly eroded. Note the two different headlight bricks used to make the face uneven.

It's also now a LEGO Ideas project. If it gets 10,000 votes, it will enter a stage of official review by designers at LEGO and has the chance to become an official set.

If you like it, please head to the link and vote for it! Comments and suggestions are also always welcome.

Hellboy

Whether I'm building a city or a fantasy layout, I love adding detail with interesting characters. There's an almost endless number of combinations you can make by mixing and matching body parts. I particularly enjoy attempting to recreate iconic pop culture characters.

Here's one of my mix-and-match results: Big Red himself, Hellboy. If you're not familiar with the graphic novels, you may have seen the movie.

The minifigure is made from 100% official parts - no custom decals or molds involved. In total, five different minifigures were raided to create the final figure.

Oil Tanker

Here's something I made a few years ago (and previously posted on my other blog).

The hull is obviously from a Police set - I'm not going to remove (or "Photoshop out") the decals for the sake of accuracy. Basically, I used parts from:

A police rescue boat
A police double-rotor rescue chopper
A garbage truck
A fishing boat

And turned them into THIS!

The oil tanker from above.

Castle Tour

For my first post, here's a Castle MOC I made a few years ago.

Rather than build a functional castle (that's been done before, and much better, by many others) I wanted to use different shapes, colours and textures to create a "ruined" castle.