How-to: Confessions of a minifig customiser – Part I: Getting started

As we say in our AFOL jargon glossary, purism is “a form of religious fundamentalism.” LEGO fandom includes a broad range of preferences for what’s “legal” and what’s not. In the spirit of broadening our horizons, we’re very pleased to bring you the first in a series of posts about LEGO minifig customization by master customizer Jasbrick.

Contrary to popular belief customisation of minifigs is not a dark art and even established purists have tried their hand at slapping some paint around (albeit on the Friends Mini-dolls). Some will never stoop to the mutilation of their favourite brand of ABS plastic, however I do believe that if done properly it can at least be appreciated by all.

The Brothers Brick have given me the opportunity to introduce you to some of the tools and techniques of my trade to help those amongst you that have the desire to walk on the dark side for a while. In later posts I will go into specific techniques that I developed in my time as a customiser. Hopefully you can benefit from avoiding the pitfalls I fell into and get a few projects like these underway:

These minifigs involve more advanced painting techniques and some third party accessories.

This group utilises painting, combinations, third-party accessories and printed decals.

Establishing a strong concept design

One tool a customiser must have is a highly developed imagination (something pretty common in the Lego community); everything else is optional.

Those moments when putting a particular combination of parts together and a perfect fig pops out are wonderful, but about as rare as chicken dentures. The key to a good custom project is pre-planning and a well defined concept. This does not have to be something completely new, as for example computer game concept art offers a rich seam of material to be interpreted, or real life inspiration can be just as good. The minifig on the right was created for a Green Beret Major currently serving in Afghanistan who sent me a photograph of himself to copy.

But if you want to start from scratch then a sketchpad is your best friend. You don’t even need to be good at drawing to develop a decent concept due to the simplicity of the design of our little friend the minifig. As this series develops I hope to be able to share with you some of the concept designs that I have developed and how they become a reality. Alternatively you can sketch your concept over a template like this:

Once the concept is set (not in stone, but pretty solid) the next step for me is to determine how much of this can be achieved with standard parts or by utilising third party accessories. I will be delving deeper into how to get the best from suppliers such as BrickArms, BrickForge, Brick Warriors and Arealight later, but I highly recommend checking out these companies as they offer a great range of products that can serve as inspiration in themselves.

Parts Library

As an AFOL who has amassed quite a large collection of minifig parts and accessories I have a library that I can dip into that can make most custom projects a matter of tweaking to get the final effect rather than building everything from scratch.

The following image is a recent group of minifigs that I put together that are without any noticeable customisation. I managed to achieve a lot with just the combination of parts and a few third party accessories thrown in to tie the concept together:

I recommend that you take a close look at the Minifig and Minifig parts areas in the catalog on Bricklink and see which figs / parts speak to you of further opportunities. Developing an inventory of useful parts is essential to allowing you to get projects moving swiftly before your enthusiasm for the concept dies.

Hikari gunship by nabii

When Mark Stafford isn’t busy designing LEGO sets or baiting Justin Bieber fans, he builds awesome stuff like this Hikari gunship. From the tiny guns up front to the massive engines in back, the gunship looks prepared to retake Earth from the insectoid horde.

I especially like the mix of red and white Technic. Mark gets bonus points for getting the name of the vehicle to match up accurately with the Kanji character — “hikari” means “light” in Japanese.

Motorized machine of destruction

This is Jarek‘s biggest and baddest Power Functions war machine, and it looks as good as it drives.

Check it out in action on Youtube and watch it destroy the Ork army.

Catch! calls the Once-ler.

He let something fall. It’s a Truffula seed. The last one of all! You’re in charge of the last of the Truffula Seeds. And Truffula Trees are what everyone needs. Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care. Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air. Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack. Then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.

The Once-ler’s house is brought to you by Jason Allemann‘s girlfriend, who built this with his advice and collection.

A Tower to Protect

Jaka Kupina’s (Captain Flint) Guard Tower is packed with fun little details. The whole thing manages to look overgrown, un-cared for, and generally miserable while still having such a clean, lovely presentation. I particularly like the fence line, myself.

Instructions for RC tank chassis

The master of Power Functions vehicles Peer Kreuger (mahjqa) posted instructions to build a RC tank chassis. You can see a video demonstration of the chassis on Youtube as well as an example of what can be built on the chassis.

LEGO invests 500 million on wind farm – energy-neutral by 2020

The LEGO Group’s parent company just announced that it is investing over half a billion dollars (3 billion Danish krone or 400 million euros) on an offshore wind farm off the coast of Germany.

The wind farm will have nearly 80 turbines, and will provide more power than LEGO’s production facilities will be projected to require in 2020, thereby enabling the company to become effectively energy self-sufficient within the next eight years.

This news follows LEGO’s announcement last summer that they are reducing LEGO packaging box sizes and obtaining their wood products from sustainable sources.

Buildings instructions for Martin Latta’s ARC-170 starfighter

If you enjoyed Martin Latta’s ARC-170 starfighter, you can now build your own thanks to the instructions posted by the builder. It’s rare that a builder takes the time to make instructions for models and shares them with the public. Even if you don’t plan on reconstructing the model, it can still be rewarding to peruse the building techniques used on a great model.

‘Like’ these cars

It’s always nice to be introduced to a new LEGO builder with an unusual technical style. Malte Dorowski builds, for the most part, miniland(ish)-scaled cars with beautiful rounded forms. And he does them well. It’s hard to be annoyed at link spamming on our Facebook page when it looks this good.

Sorry Son, Daddy Needs Your Bricks

I wonder if this diorama by Karwick stirs up memories for any of our readers. It depicts an AFOL father who’s decided to take over his children’s Lego collection, and start building. I’ll take the tied up children as a bit of poetic license.

The story aside, this diorama is packed full of well-built details. A few of note are the radiator under the shelf on the right side, the wall light above the bed, with cord leading to an outlet, and the clever floor.

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