Seaplane

In addition to building MOCs (My Own Creations), it's also a lot of fun modifying existing LEGO sets into something slightly different. Here's something I built a few years ago, a seaplane based on the passenger jet in the 2010 Airport set.

First I shortened the fuselage, and moved the wings to the top of the aircraft.

For comparison, here's a shot of the plane I started with:

Maritime Museum

As Minotaur Bay grew, it also gained a Museum. The building was from a set, but I swapped out the clock for a ship's wheel to give it a maritime touch appropriate for a seaside town.

The Horse's Head

The next building I made for Minotaur Bay was a pub, The Horse's Head. I wanted an old-style look for the architecture, so took a lot of the pieces from one of my favourite Castle sets, the Medieval Market Village. The horse-head sign from over the blacksmith makes a great painted pub sign.

Cafe

With plans for a three-baseplate-wide display, I needed a couple more buildings to line the street. I worked on a basic footprint of 8 x 16, which allows for easy rearranging of buildings alongside baseplates.

Below is a cafe, built on an upper storey above another business, a transport company. The side panels from the Cargo Truck were easily modified into building walls.

Mythbusters

Here are two minifigs I feature in my "Comic Con" themed display.

The bodies are both fairly common city workers found in many LEGO City sets. I had to find two bearded faces, with one having a prominent goatee. I used a light brown hairpiece to match the beard colour on the "Adam" figure, and of course found a beret (not a common part) for "Jamie".

Pizzeria

To fit in the Seafood Restaurant, my beach setup grew to two baseplates wide, which then meant more buildings to fill in the street.

The first addition was the Pizzeria, modded from its official form as part of the Town Square. I removed the outdoor seating area and moved it onto a 16 x 32 baseplate. I put a jumper plate behind the "City Pizza" sign so that it could be set at an angle, and then added construction workers to that it looked like the sign was still being fixed into place. The worker on the right is hanging the menu on the wall.

Seafood Restaurant

After the apartment building, I kept going with the blue and white colour scheme and built another beachside building - a seafood restaurant.

It was partly inspired by some fish and chip shops near the Gold Coast that combined a takeaway service with a sit-down restaurant.

Apartments - Interior

After I built my seaside apartments, I furnished them and gave them occupants.

The ground floor has a reception counter, a TV on the wall (I think the wall panel is from a police station set), a rug and a sofa. The sofa is made from just four elements - a 2x6 brick, a 1x4 brick, and 2 hinge bricks. As the ground floor, the only windows are on the front wall.

Seaside Apartments

After I built my beach, I wanted to build a luxury apartment building like you would see on the Gold Coast. Here's the finished product:

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.

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.

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.