LEGO Fan Weekend 2011

Last weekend I was in Skærbæk, Denmark at LEGO Fan Weekend. I’m still a bit tired and exhausted from coming back at 4’oclock in the morning on Tuesday, then sleeping for about 5 hours and going straight to work… but it was all worth it 😀 The event was great, and I got to display my Brickfoot Village, and my collectible minifig shelf (all 5 series!). I think I’m going to have to use panorama assist to get the whole thing into one pic when I add more series 😛

But I have to admit, Monday after the event may have been the best day of the trip, as we not only got to visit the LEGO idea house in Billund and the decoration and packaging facility (which also did minifig assembly), but we were allowed a two hour shopping spree with LEGO at around 50% discount! Needless to say, everyone went a bit crazy in there. And it was a tight fit in my car (check out this picture, taken after I had taken out our regular luggage with clothes and such…)

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The Yellow Flash

The Eurobricks Spaghetti Western competition had 3 categories, and one of them was to build a western train. I had never built a train before, so I figured I would skip that category, but then I was struck with inspiration and thought it would be a good challenge. I was hard pressed on time too, since I had also entered the two other categories. But I was able to finish just in time, with only a half hour to spare! And here is the result. The locomotive is based on a Denver & Rio Grande steam engine, DRG268. The rest is mostly fiction, only loosely based on pictures I could find of trains from that time.

I’m quite pleased with the result, seeing as it’s my first train MOC. But there’s also a lot of things I would have loved to improve, given more time. I would also have liked to motorize it, but I fear it’s to fragile at the moment to be able to run around a track without falling apart 😀

I’m also very happy with the texture on my caboose. It was a last minute idea to use plates to create this effect, and I had to borrow a load of them to have enough (since I didn’t have time to buy more on bricklink).

I wanted to use all my purple train windows from the Harry Potter Knight Bus set, so I made my wagons purple, although that may be an untraditional color from that time. I think they turned out quite alright though. There’s a post and baggage wagon with sliding doors and shelves for mail and suit cases inside, a passenger wagon, and a dining wagon with a small kitchen. Here’s a picture of the dining wagon.

You can see more pictures on flickr, including close ups of the locomotive and pictures of all the wagons, including the interior. I think I may take some additional pictures too, as I was sort of stressed out when I took these in a hurry to get them uploaded in time for the deadline. I’ll see when I can get around to that, as I’m still busy building for a deadline, this time for my trip to Lego Fan Weekend in Skærbæk in a week.

 

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Jessy the Bandit

I’ve really been on a roll lately, cramming out creations for the Eurobricks Spaghetti Western competition. First it was Brickfoot tribe village, and then I made this little saloon vignette. It’s supposed to illustrate the fear the villagers have for the gruesome bandit Jessy.

This is also the first creation that I have photographed using my new studio light. In this one, I have not done anything to the color or light balance in gimp, and I think the result is quite good. The bright light really makes a difference, and makes it a lot easier to get good pictures.

I’ve also been working hard to finish a western train in time for the competition, and I made it just in time! Stay tuned for pictures!

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My new studio light

My husband was so kind and gave me a couple of studio lights for my birthday today. I really think this will greatly improve the quality of the pictures I take of my LEGO creations. Can’t wait to try :) I’m setting it all up now so I can test it on a small vig I’ve recently made (but not had time to photograph yet). Stay tuned for the results!

I've got two of these babies :)

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A study in waterfalls

I’ve always been fascinated by waterfalls. So was my grandfather, apparently. He was an artist, and painted a lot of waterfalls. I can’t paint, or draw, or any such thing, but I build LEGO! And naturally, I love trying to build waterfalls in LEGO :) Bulding waterfalls in LEGO is a big challenge for many reasons. A waterfall is something powerful, something moving, and it’s water. How do you represent that in LEGO? I have seen many creative solutions by many excellent builders, but here are some of my takes on it. From my first attempt, to my most recent.

This was my first attempt. It’s actually supposed to portray a frozen waterfall in winter, but the technique could just as well be used for a non-frozen one. This one felt a bit too square and it doesn’t look real, but I think I may be on to something 😉

My next attempt is a more stylistically blue waterfall. Blue is a common color used to represent water, but it undoubtedly becomes more cartoonish, as we all know a waterfall isn’t blue… I think I achieved some good dynamics in this, portraying how the water splits into multiple streams upon hitting rocks that stick out of the mountain side. I’ve seen this technique used by others as well, and it certainly does the job well, if you’re not in need of color realism.

The waterfall in this one (hidden in the back) wasn’t very successful in my opinion. It’s very blocky and doesn’t look natural at all. I wanted realism in color for this one, otherwise I think the previous variant with the blue arches would have worked better here. But I think this technique could be adapted to look better, and I would probably have made it look more natural if I had thought about it while building the mountain, instead of after placing everything else… (in addition, the color of the rest of the water is blue, but it should have been a more muddy-water color, but that’s an other story :P)

In my opinion, this is my best waterfall yet. I think I captured both the dynamic and the color quite well in this one. This technique could possibly have been used to create a better waterfall in the previous case also. I think I’ll be using this technique more, while still looking out for other ideas in the future :)

Which is your favorite? 😉

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Brickfoot tribe village

I’ve been working on this for some time now, and after getting my last bricklink order with two pieces I needed for the totempole, it’s finally finished! This time I chose to do some post-processing to my pictures in gimp before uploading them, and I feel that it makes a huge difference to the presentation, so I’ll definitely be doing that from now on! But it’s quite amazing what a few auto-features can do to the color balance and lighting. Fixing the background is a lot harder, but well worth it! But enough talk, on to some pictures:

Have a look in my flickr stream for more pictures.

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LDD in Linux

Being part of several different minorities, among them being a Linux user and an adult LEGO builder, I’m part of an even smaller minority: a user of LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) under wine in Linux. First time I tried running LDD in wine, it didn’t go so well. The program installed and started just fine, but once I tried to select a brick, it crashed. I quickly gave up, thinking it just wasn’t meant to be. Then LDD 4 was released. I decided to try again, and suddenly, it worked! Now, I’m not sure if it worked because LDD 4 was more compatible with wine, if wine had gotten better, or maybe most likely, the graphics drivers for Linux had gotten loads better (or possibly a combination of those).

In any case, I’m happy to now be able to use LDD in Linux, although it’s still not perfect (uploading of models to the web through the Design By Me process does not work at all). But there’s one more thing I need: the ability to upload the list of bricks used in a model to a wanted list in bricklink, so they can be viewed and ordered. There are some tools for windows to do this, but I haven’t tried those in wine, as what I really just need is a simple little script. So I made one! It didn’t take much investigating to figure out I could just unzip the lxf files created by LDD, and get an easily readable xml out of it. As it turns out, all I needed was a simple little perl-script to parse this xml, convert the LEGO color ids to bricklink color ids (found a mapping table for this that I just pasted into my script), and create an xml file in bricklink’s chosen format. And voila! Just upload to bricklink!

Now, of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. Some element ids that come out of LDD aren’t directly compatible with bricklink for various reasons. But instead of trying to compile a comprehensive mapping here (I could probably get such a list), I just chose to tackle the incompatible numbers as they presented themselves. So when I upload a list, some elements are rejected by bricklink. I then find out what those elements are in LDD, and find the equivalent number on bricklink that I can insert in a mapping table in my script, so it will work next time. Seeing as my script is a bit unpolished and unfinished in terms of element mapping, I’m not going to share it with the world just yet. I might do so though, if I can get a comprehensive element mapping (or someone really begs me to have the script even without it), and get a few quirks sorted out. But for now, I’m a happy LDD user in Linux :)

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Getting into Fabuland

I’ve been on vacation for a couple of weeks now, enjoying the sun and eating loads of ice cream. I’ve also been working on some LEGO projects, planning and designing my collectible minifigs series 5 vignettes on my laptop, stacking something like 1500 1×2 plates for a diorama I’m working on, and this last weekend, building something in a genre I never thought I’d get into: Fabuland.

I guess you could say I was sort of challenged. I commented on a Fabuland MOC, and one thing led to another, and suddenly I “had” to create a home for my two only Fabuland figures: two crocodiles I got in a small pile of old childhood LEGO a friend gave me. The result? A little riverside cottage where the Croc Brothers enjoy the quiet life with some fishing.

See more views in my flickr stream.

 

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Confessions of an APPathetic User

This blog post really says it all about how I feel about the apps-craze out there.
Confessions of an APPathetic User | Tabula Crypticum

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Pirates of the Caribbean – The fountain of youth

The latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, along with the recent release of Pirates of the Caribbean LEGO has driven me into a bit of a Pirates of the Caribbean craze… I’ve been rewatching the old movies, listening to the movie soundtrack and building the LEGO sets. But LEGO’s puny little fountain of youth spurred me to make my own version, the way I remembered it from the movie. Now, I have only seen the movie once, so it might still be lacking in movie accuracy, but I’m pretty sure it’s better than LEGO’s version 😉

See the rest of the pictures in my flickr stream.

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