Tag Archives: Building Techniques

Building trees with minifig antlers, Pt. 2: Branching out with Forestmen [Feature]

The last few years have been bountiful for fans of LEGO flora with new elements and recolors vastly expanding the range of plastic plant life. Maybe it’s nostalgia for the oak trees I grew up with on the Central Coast of California, or maybe it’s my love of noodling with the smallest of LEGO elements, but the plant piece I’ve been most excited about lately is the minifig antlers in green, which recently showed up on some pick-a-brick shops. In the first installment of this feature, I explored ways that this element could be used in microscale trees. For part 2, I’ll explore using the part on minifig scale MOCs. As it was the Forestmen sub-theme that launched my love of LEGO trees, what better place to apply this new part than on one of their iconic hideouts?

To jump-start the process, I’ve agreed to help my Forestmen friends remodel the Forest Hideout GWP. The set is itself a remake of the smallest Forestmen tree set, all of which feature a brick-built tree with a thick black trunk and stubby limbs reminiscent of an ancient English Oak (Perhaps one like this). The re-imagined set incorporates curved elements for the branches but sticks with the classic leaf elements, to match the style in the Lion Knights’ Castle. There’s something undeniably pleasing about the bendy trees next to rigid stone walls, but for my remake, I wanted to bring things a little closer to the look of an old oak. But first… we’re going to need a lot more leaves! 100 minifig antlers was barely enough for a micro-scale forest grove. By chance, a group of Black Falcons had just left Ye Olde Pick-a-Brick with a wagon full of antlers that my Forestmen friends were all too happy to liberate.

Grab a bow and join me and the Forestmen for a grand tree adventure

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This spectactular Snoopy is a matter of perspective [Building Techniques]

Good grief, that’s some Nice Parts Usage! In this tiny build, Ian Summers captures the silhouette of beloved Peanuts pooch Snoopy in just 8 elements through the perfect mix of parts and clever use of perspective. Two of those parts are hats – a white baseball cap for the belly and a black cap for an ear – and for Snoopy’s muzzle and nose, I spy a Mixels eye. Pal Woodstock is unmistakable from just two tiny yellow elements. By framing the pieces from just the right angle, Ian gets the most from every piece in matching the shapes of the comic strip inspirations.

Ian’s builds are, as his handle suggests, bricktacular. A member of LEGO Ideas’ 10K club, Ian’s Jumanji board is currently under review to become an official set and probably won’t unleash rhinos in your living room.

Celebrate Fabuland with your own Maid of Fabuland microscale steamboat [Instructions]

Are you a Fabuland fan but won’t be able to make the trip to Billund for the official LEGO tribute set? Or perhaps you love steamboats but are scared by the price tag on the upcoming Ideas set? Or maybe you just love cute things and walruses! In any case, Fabuland’s biggest “Fabufan,” and all around nice human Stewart Lamb Cromer has you covered with free instructions for a microscale version of the Maid of Fabuland paddle steamer that he built for display at LEGO House.

Here’s Stewart posing with the full-size version at LEGO House. Stewart talks about the build journey and his challenges with losing sight in one eye in a moving account on his blog.

Building trees with minifig antlers, Pt. 1: Microscale [Feature]

Ever since LEGO released Reindeer Fan with a new head accessory, I’ve been wondering when we’d see element 6440443 antlers used as foliage in a LEGO set considering how closely it resembles oak leaves. The Fountain Garden set released in January contains a single use of the leaf, but in white. Inspired by this lush tree from Ryan McBride, and not seeing many uses of the part in MOCs, I decided to do some experiments myself. But first I needed to source more leaves. Fortunatey I had just the Forestmen for the job…

Read on to learn how to make microscale trees with antlers

Fabulous Final Fantasy Carriage and build your own chocobo [Instructions]

If there’s one thing you can count on with a Final Fantasy game, even more than chocobos, moogles, or a mechanic named Cid, it’s the inevitable remake. In that spirit, Kevin Wanner, the Brick Ninja, revisits an earlier build with an all-new LEGO recreation of a beloved Final Fantasy VII scene. It’s impressive to see how the builder has grown in the intervening years. The chocobo looks fluffier than ever with a rounder aesthetic, and the terrain goes from afterthought to an immersive scene with integrated lighting. The main attraction is the carriage itself, which Kevin redesisgned from the ground up. Expanded to 8 studs wide, the carriage is now proportional and screen accurate and features an interior space for Tifa to make her under-cover trip to Don Corneo’s.

But about that chocobo, if you’re interested in building your own, click on the poster below for Kevin’s free instructions.

Celebrate some NPU with a LEGO creation you can almost hear [Building Techniques]

Sometimes it’s the simplest things that are the most satisfying. Take this brilliant use of a white LEGO plant stem to denote champagne spray, for example. All in all, it’s a simple build and a simple composition but Erin Dempsey piece is so effective, you can pretty much hear the champagne cork pop. Sparkles behind the creation adds an unmistakable festive atmosphere. Sometimes, like in the case of this Nice Parts Usage (NPU), you got to find a reason to celebrate in your own way. Cheers!

LEGO doodling – following unusual parts wherever they lead [Building Techniques]

Some LEGO builds are born from a clear vision of the final model. Others are more like doodles where you improvise as you go, finding joy in the parts you use along the way. Pan Noda provides little context for this latest bizarro creation, “Trioffic Lights,” but I’m guessing it falls in the doodle camp, an extension of the builder’s rescent fascination with DUPLO tubes. Aside from the star elements, DUPLO balls with faces, Pan Noda pulls in a mix of pleasing parts and techniques, like tank treads to wrap the faces, inverted rubber tires for the joints, corner window visors, Aquazone octagonal legs, and Belville perfume bottle fingers. Despite such an ecclectic set of elements, the build keeps coherent by sticking to the three primary colors. The results walk a fine line between nightmare and whimsy, a liminal space Pan Noda is qutie familiar with.

What’s the strangest place your LEGO doodling has taken you?

LEGO enters its oak tree era with 6440443 antlers in green [Building Techniques]

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!

Itty bitty Big Daddy will leave you in Rapture [Instructions]

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?

How to give your microscale architecture a leg up [Building Technique]

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.

Making mech heads in LEGO with Moko [Building Techniques]

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.

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.

This tree is off the chain! [Building Techniques]

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.