LEGO

FLUDD (Flash Liquidizer Ultra Dousing Device) Inspired by Super Mario Sunshine

I started replaying Super Mario Sunshine™ on my Nintendo GameCube earlier this year, so I was inspired to make a few builds inspired by the game, the largest of which is just over 10″ tall, including the Shine Sprite base. This was a fun build since it incorporates a lot of newer round pieces such as 2×2 round tiles with holes, 2×2 round plates with single studs, 6×6 round plates, and 3×3 rounded macaroni bricks, and of course the Jurassic World Gyrosphere pieces that I used on my Gumball Machine a few years back.

This is my first build that I’m releasing concurrently with downloadable instructions, which you can get below:

Full Photo Album for FLUDD

Bowser

After looking over my Bowser’s Airship and having fun with the official LEGO set that came out earlier this month, I decided to make a LEGO Bowser to scale with my LEGO Mario figure (which is to scale with the Mario cap). After a few days of work, I’m very pleased with the result, and I hope you are too!

If you’d like to build one for yourself, instructions with stickers are available for download in my shop: LINK!

See the full album on Flickr: LINK

Custom Minifigures

I’ve recently ventured into a whole new realm of the multi-faceted LEGO fan universe that I’ve wanted to for quite some time; selling custom designed and printed minifigures. All of these offerings will be available in my store. The first of these will be posted soon, and for more of a personal backstory of this announcement, please read below. 🙂

Why Custom Minifigures?

I love collecting and displaying LEGO minifigures… maybe as much as building with LEGO bricks…

I’ve been collecting minifigs as far as I can remember, but really delving into it when the Star Wars theme began back in 1999. Collecting LEGO Star Wars minifigs took over my desire to collect Kenner/Hasbro Star Wars action figures, and (thankfully) probably prevented me from starting on other collections.

There were a lot of minifigs that I waited for the LEGO group to produce. The longer I waited (20 years now in some cases), the more I realized that there are certain minifigs that the LEGO company will not (or can not) produce, and I’d either have to get used to that, or look at other options. Case in point; we still have yet to receive a Darth Sidious minifigure that’s been promised (at least in artwork, pictured here) dating back to 1999.

There are minifigs from movies, TV shows, video games, etc. that I’d like to own. LEGO Ideas has helped to bring a lot of those to official LEGO minifig form. There are so many custom minifigure outlets that produce amazing work, that it helps to fill in the gaps of what the LEGO group hasn’t made/won’t make.

There are even more figures that I’d like to own that are so unique, or just undesirable to anyone but me, that there’s no way that I could expect to ever see them offered by the LEGO group or a custom outlet.

Jabba’s Palace Luke (left) and Bespin Luke (right)

I also like consistency. So having a collection of, for example, Luke Skywalker minifigs, in every different outfit he wore in the original Star Wars trilogy, is great. But having different styles (naturally styles have changed in the 20 years of designing minifigure prints), from my perspective, serves to highlight the past negatively by showing how much better the current style and quality are. In this picture, Jabba’s Palace Luke has simple printing on his torso only, and has brown eyebrows, while Bespin Luke is highly detailed on his torso and legs, and has dark tan eyebrows. So, consistency fail, in by book. I realized that the only way I could get the consistency I wanted was to design minifigs myself.

I played around with designing a few years back, and really enjoyed it. After delving into collecting custom minifigures and working with several custom outlets to print some bricks/minifigures for myself and for commissions, I’ve decided to venture out into offering some minifigs that I think other people might want to own as well.

The first of these figures will be revealed very soon. I hope you like the selection that I’ll be offering, and consider picking some up for yourself! 🙂

Minnie Mouse

I started my Mickey Mouse (based off Paul Lee‘s, which was in turn inspired by the Lowell Sphere) with no intention to follow up beyond the original build, but it’s morphed into seven builds so far. The last of those builds is this Minnie, which I originally wrote off as uninteresting and not possible with the color palette LEGO currently offers. I was wrong on both counts; once I found that there was an “official, non-standard” (red dress with white polka dots) version of Minnie, I decided to give it a go, and I’m really happy with where it ended up. My daughter is too.