Lego “Pictures With Santa” MOC

Merry Christmas! 

An opportunity came up recently to create a Lego vignette for a build competition held by Lego at their Rebrick site. The task was to create a room to add to one of Lego’s modular buildings. The Grand Emporium is the Lego shopping mall, and being Christmas time, malls across the country feature a pop-up Christmas display where parents and children line up to get their picture taken with Santa. It can be a happy and exciting time, or it can be a frustrating and miserable experience. Sometimes both at once! It has become a modern tradition to parade our children in front of Santa so they can happily tell him what they want for Christmas or they can ball their eyes out in a wild screaming fit. Either way, picture worthy and parents line up for hours to roll those dice to see what reaction they’ll get that year. I tried to capture all of the usual elements in one small scene. 

This vignette was more fun than usual because I enlisted my lovely wife to help me design it! She has a very good asthetic  eye for design and decorating so she was able to help with the layout and ideas for what to add and I was able to interpret those ideas into the model. A perfect team! Even got her doing some building, she created the holly decorations on the wall flanking the fireplace, which is an elegant touch and I love it. As someone who hasn’t been overly thrilled about my Lego hobby, it was a great experience to get her involved and share that time with her. We stayed up into the wee hours of the morning one night making this, and she said she had trouble sleeping because she kept thinking about ideas for things to change or add. Welcome to the club honey. 😉 

So this vignette is a typical festive scene, centered around Santa in an oversized comfy chair in front of a fireplace, which does light up in fact! I mounted a light brick on the back side of the wall to illuminate the fireplace with a warm glow. 


Includes the familiar Christmas fare like Christmas tree, North Pole sign, snowman, table with milk and cookie, and presents. One child in line has a happy expression and one is crying, very typical in this situation!

 

Also features a mother who brought her baby in for first pictures with Santa, and her and the photographer doing whatever it takes to get a smile out of baby, also very typical for this scene!

This was a lot of fun and I loved finally doing a Christmas scene in Lego, and having my wife help me was a joy and I think the result was far better than it would have been if I did it on my own, and it got done much quicker. Thanks for checking it out, I hope you enjoy and Merry Christmas! 


j.

May The Fourth Be With You…

This year I’ve had fun coming up with little Lego scenes featuring myself and my wife as mini figures to celebrate certain holidays. And while May 4th isn’t exactly a holiday, it is a day for nerds everywhere to remember that they still love Star Wars. 

  
Fans of Star Wars will recognize everything in the picture but just to add a little commentary I’ll explain the image. I used the Mos Eisley cantina as the setting, it makes a great background full of familiar characters. I threw together a couple tables with chairs to fill the place out. I had a bunch of stormtroopers so decided to insert my wife and I as stormtroopers enjoying some time out, and with the family! The little stormtrooper cadet is our daughter Scarlett and she is holding a teddy bear, representing our 4 month old son Bear. 😄 And I brought my guitar in hopes of jamming with the Bith musicians.

These are fun for me to get a chance to play and use my collection for something creative, and really fun to personalize it. Enjoy these “behind the scenes” shots, one of the whole scene I created and one of Scarlett checking her mini fig self out and playing with the set (after pictures were taken of course).

  
 

I hope you’ve enjoyed my little contribution and tribute to the May 4th nerd holiday, thanks for checking it out!

j.

Lego Holiday Building Competition

In early December there was a festive building competition held by Brickset to create something original using just the two 2014 promotional holiday sets. Prizes included new 2015 sets. The first set was available with purchase in October, but the submissions really ramped up when the 2nd of the two sets became available during Black Friday weekend in the end of November. Here’s what I had to work with.

Toy Workshop 40106

Winter Skating Scene 40107

The challenge was to take these two sets, dump them out, and make something new and original and holiday themed. There were so many awesome submissions! There really was quite a range to the creativity. In the end, a panel of judges selected what they believed to be the best of the bunch.

My Experience:

I’m sorry to say my submission wasn’t among those selected, but it was such a fun thing to do! Sometimes it breeds creativity to have a certain amount of stipulations. In this case, only being able to use a certain number of pieces was fun, you had limits, which in the world of Lego, is a welcome challenge. There were a lot of great pieces to work with too! When I threw all the pieces out, I really wasn’t sure what I was gonna come up with, I just started sticking pieces together, and to my amazement, quite quickly, I had a direction to focus on. I wanted to make some sort of display vignette. After playing with the pieces for a few minutes and setting a base, I discovered what I was going to build: an Elf Wedding. Below were my two pictures submitted of the set I created.

I had the runway, some present-like decoration along the sides, bride and groom elves with their diamonds, a pastor, and an altar with a lot of festive decoration, along with the notion that elves must have some sort of love ceremony, and what better season than the holiday season for an elf to get married? The most coveted of all wedding dates I’m sure. I was very happy with what I was able to throw together, in a short amount of time, with very little changes. I played with the decorations along the aisle a bit, and in the end extended the runway. Like I said, it was a fun exercise to build something using a limited set of pieces, it really made you think about each piece you were using and if it were necessary, much like I would think Lego designers must do when creating sets.

Thanks to Lego and the folks at Brickset for hosting this competition. Such a fun thing to do, especially around the holidays, and really promotes creativity! I hope to see things like this in the future!

j.