When working in LEGO, texture is everything! Case in point, check out this evil scientist by Mattia Careddu. Through the clever placement of cherries covering their head, Dr. Voltainsminz comes off as a slimy, alien-like villain bent on world domination!
Today marks the roll-out of a little part that promises to have a bit impact on the future of LEGO trees – 6440443 antlers in green. The part first debuted in 2022 as an accessory to the Reindeer costume, but surely the designers at the time recognized the resemblance to a pair of oak leaves? So far the piece has only appeared in green in 2 sets, making the part fairly hard to come by. This is about to change as the part trickles out into Pick a Brick offerings from LEGO (currently available in Europe), making it easy to stock up. Builder Ryan McBryde has managed to amass quite a collection of the part already and demonstrates how effective these leaves can be when used as the primary foliage on a large tree.
It’s not an easy part to work with as the primary connection point is the small peg used for hair accessories, but Ryan found a few effective ways to integrate with branches. The workhorse partner in Ryan’s tree is the 1×1 round plate with shaft which conveniently has a hold in the shaft to match the antlers’ small peg. It looks like Ryan also relies on the tight squeeze between the inner prongs to chain together another pair of antlers.
Maybe it’s because I was such a fan of the Forestmen faction in my early building days, but I’ve always adored brick-built LEGO trees. Options for foliage elements have steadily increased over the years, even ignoring the unconventional parts used as plants in the Botanicals line. This part has me very excited for the creative solutions the community will find for working them into the next wave of trees. The era of oak trees has arrived!
Modern LEGO houses are a great opportunity to decorate with furniture made with unexpected parts to get that sleek and simple style. Sarah Beyer is a connoisseur of creating delightful modern furniture and decor, like this cozy sitting area with a white vase made from a Technic pin, the stools topped with round inverted tiles, and the lamp made by facing two gear elements together with an offset.
With Valentine’s Day coming up, have you considered building a LEGO floral arrangement for your sweetie? The official Botanicals collection makes it easy. However, Khang Huynh takes it a step further with some stunning build techniques. At quick glance, this may appear to be “just” a well-appointed, well-photographed floral arrangement; so realistic you can hardly tell it’s LEGO. But upon close inspection, the flowers are comprised of red capes while repetitive use of green surfboards make up the leaves. Put it all together in a classy vase (including what seems to be a light brick, no less) and you have something quite lovely indeed.
You can tell someone has fired up the Iron Forge because of so many clever uses for their seed part. This time, we’ve got LEGO flower stems and filbrick pulls it off with style. The large cactus (or succulent) is adorned in your usual green flower stems to create its spines while its smaller prickly friend sports the same part in olive green. There’s even one flower stem in lavender. Finally, a few brown stems creates the unmistakable ruffle around the vulture’s neck. The eye looks as if you can screw that in with a flathead screwdriver but it is a clever use of the wheel bearing part. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a fan of the pouring un-bricked parts as demonstrated here with the desert ground.
Builder Jan Woźnica has a strong reputation in the world of LEGO space builds. Case in point, you may remember LEGO Ideas 21340 Tales of the Space Age, a set soon to retire from the slate of available sets on the LEGO site. While this isn’t as minimalist as those great pieces of art, this take on a Martian space elevator is stellar, featuring some forced perspective that’s out of this world!
A certain recently confirmed political official had us Googling brainworms a bit more than usual lately. Perhaps this has been the case with Djokson who has presented his own brainworm. We have a slew of the 2×2 round bricks with 45 degree elbows in both white and trans-dark pink. You’d have to stockpile at least a couple of the DreamZzz Never Witch’s Nightmare Creatures sets to obtain those tasty trans-pink ones. Maybe this is just the brainworms talking here but I am clueless as to what that brain piece is from. While it shares some family resemblance, it is most certainly NOT this piece. Let us know in the comments what that neat brain part might be because I am truly braindead on the matter.
These clever LEGO build techniques are brought to you by a ton of minifig heads. Cab ~ utilizes the aforementioned minifig heads as the yellow buoys denoting the lanes in the pool and also the floaties on that one swimmer’s (or floater’s) arms. Repetitive use of 1×2 trans-blue tiles comprizes the pool water nicely. They’re not bricked directly onto the pool floor but rather suspended above it to give the illusion of depth. As for the swim or float question, for me, it’s floaties all the way. I’ll also take some washboard abs to help offset the embarrassment of using floaties.
It’s been 18 years since gamers first explored the fallen “utopia” of  Rapture and we still can’t forget the Big Daddies who haunt its undersea halls. In game, those lumbering living diving suits are the stuff of nightmares, but built at minifig scale by BrickAA, they’re not nearly as scary. Shall we call them “L’il Papas” instead? BrickAA has quite a knack for pint-sized mechs and makes many instructions for their builds freely available, including the instructions for this adorable Big Daddy. What are you waiting for? In the words of Andrew Ryan, “a fan chooses to build.”
Should you prefer your Big Daddies a little… bigger, why not revisit this classic build from Eero Okkonen?
Sometimes a “sketch” of a bigger LEGO project can turn into stunning work in its own right. That’s certainly the case with Roanoke Handybuck‘s towering pirate village, where using stilts in place of terrain creates negative space that heightens the fantastical architecture of arches and overhangs, accentuating the surreal beauty. Maybe the results can inspire you to find a hidden masterpiece in your own unfinsihed LEGO projects.
When it comes to building LEGO mechs, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone with as much experience and expertise as Moko. The Japanese builder has been posting and sharing robotic creations with us for 20 years, going back to 2005 and this sad little Gundam! Moko’s latest big project, this incredible combining Mechazord, was one of our most popular articles of 2024. Today Moko is sharing techniques for building mech heads like these.
![LEGO Mech Heads Vol 2 [How to Build]](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54261995754_40705b0ddb_b.jpg)
Follow along as Moko guides you through the advanced techniques used to build heads like these from simple parts you probably already have in your collection.
For more mech head tutorials, check out Moko’s previous video with four different styles.
With LEGO, you can turn something as industrial and gray as chains into something organic like a tree. Fedde Barendrecht shows us how, and I believe it involved clicking chain parts together end-to-end, connecting each unclicked end to the barrel-made tree trunk, then twisting the chain into a roughly a tree-shaped mass. Top it off with a wiley raven and you have the makings for an epic neighborhood showdown. Raven:1, Lino:0.
