Bits and Bricks

I see have neglected my blog for sometime again now. I guess I’ll just have to blame that on being busy (again). A lot has happened the last month though. I have moved out of my apartment and am currently living at my mother’s house until my new house is finished next week. So all my LEGO is sort of packed away now, but that doesn’t stop me from buying sets or cracking out some bricks to build a little!

I have also had two LEGO related trips recently. First we went to Trondheim where Brikkelauget held it’s first self hosted event. Which was awesome I brought a lot of models with me there to display: my Fabuland houses, winter village, Brickfoot village, yellow train and collectible minifig shelves. Phew! I also won the  contest for best vehicle with my Santa sleigh, and shared first place in the Historic contest with my Brickfoot village (had to wait a bit for my prize in that one though, since the other guy got to bring home the one we had there).

Last weekend I went to the Eurobricks event in Billund to meet up with people I have become acquainted with over the internet, and it was a lot of fun We got to meet the AFOLs’ favourite designer, Jamie Berard, who held a presentation about the design process of the upcoming Sopwith Camel model. And former Eurobricks Star Wars moderator Kim Thomson told us about how he got a job as community coordinator at LEGO. We also went to Legoland and I got to ride the new super awesome Polar Expedition roller coaster Yeah, I love roller coasters

Ever since I got out of my dark ages, I’ve had this strange urge to build Holmenkollbakken (the ski jump in Holmenkollen in Oslo) in LEGO. My first attempt, made only from bricks from 4 blue buckets wasn’t exactly a masterpiece And ever since, I’ve been afraid to try again. I tried to build an architecture scale version of the old Holmenkollbakken last year, but it turned out so boring I didn’t even want to post pictures of it online… Now, however, spurred on by a contest at Eurobricks, I have made a new attempt, but this time with the new Holmenkollbakken. I also made a little 3D TV scene out of it, to fit in the contest.

See more photos on flickr.

One of the first things I did as an AFOL was put together a sigfig. I didn’t have many minifig parts to choose from then, so I wasn’t completely happy with the result, but it has stuck around for a couple of years. I recently changed the head for one i like a bit better, but I’m still open for changing again if a new and better face shows up

Now, as time moved on,  I have discovered a hidden love for the old Fabuland LEGO. And the need has thus come for a fabusigfig. And to introduce her to my sigfig, I made this little vig.

Cecilie Sigfig is out training with her swords.

She practices the martial art called Iaido, and has a daily morning practice in a japanese garden.

She is just getting warmed up, when a figure approaches from behind…

She senses a presence, and turns around, slightly startled by what she sees.
“Oh, hello, didn’t mean to sneak up on you, I was just so intrigued by your sword handling.”
“That’s OK, you new around here?”
“Yes, I’m from Fabuland, my name is Cecilie Cottontail.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Cecilie Sigfig. Want to try some sword practice with me?”
“I can?”
“Of course! Let me go get my extra swords, and we can practice together.”
“Cool!”

“Wow, these swords are really nice.”
“Yes, they are. They come from the land of Ninjago.”
“Nice. I hope you’ll let me come here to train with you, so I can learn to handle them like you.”
“Sure thing. I train every morning, you can come as often as you like.”
“Then I’ll be here every morning!”

This is my last in the female heroes series for a while (I actually finished it some time ago, but never got around to blogging about it). Inspired by one of my favorite LEGO sets, the Ice station odyssey, I made an ice planet base populated by only female scientists. I feel that I still need some practice in building space-stuff, as I’m not quite happy with everything in this build, but I got to experiment a bit and have some fun building space

I also had some fun in gimp afterwards, adding stars to the background, and I think the effect turned out OK for someone as useless with image editing software as I am

My favorite part of the build is this little vehicle transporting an alien encased in ice. The vehicle itself is blatantly copied from the old official LEGO set (though with some color modifications to accommodate the parts that I have). The ice block is made up a whole bunch of 1×2 trans plates, and is inspired by one of my favorite pictures from an old LEGO catalog.

I also included a couple of play features, namely an elevator (it doesn’t work very well though ) and a rotating door. Here’s a couple of shots of the interior.

I’m not sure what the round thing in the middle is supposed to be, but I guess it was inspired by the warp core as seen in Star Trek: Voyager (been watching a lot of that lately ), although a warp core doesn’t make sens in a stationary base… So lets just say it’s some heating/energy thingy It’s sci-fi!

The 3D effect is just stunning in this chalk drawing of something that looks like a terracotta LEGO army.

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/07/lego-army-invades-chalkfestival-to-free-ego-leonard.html