(Written by legogeek)
Today I would like to talk a bit about posing your LEGO minifigures. While LEGO minifigures have some range of motion (arms and legs moving back and forth, wrists and head turning) they do miss a lot of the natural movement of the human body. Therefore it can be challenging to put your minifig in a natural looking pose. Below I will show you a couple of tricks I use to make minifigures look better in dioramas or for taking pictures. 🙂
➡ LEGO MINIFIGURE SWORD HOLDING POSITION
LEGO Minifigures by default can hold swords in one hand (first picture ), and because of the movement of the wrists, you can get a good range of motion. However if you would like your minifigure to hold a larger sword with two hands, you would have to use some unconventional methods; you will need to pop out one of the arms from its socket and the clip the unattached hand/arm assembly to the sword. (Please note that the arms are not intended for regular attaching/detaching like you can do with the legs, torso and head. Regularly detaching the arm will eventually loosen the joint so you will end up with a very limp arm. However you can safely pop the arms in and out 2-3 times without any permanent damage.)
With the arms attached this way (second picture) they look much better and more natural, however now you are left with a hole in the side of the minifigure. The easies way to fix this is to put a cape over the minifigure and hide the side of the torso (third picture). A slightly more complex way would be to barely attach the hand to the arm (and thus elongate it) and position the arm as close to the arm-socket as possible. This way you can hide the hole at the side of the minifig. You can even add an armor piece for a more complete coverage (fourth picture).
➡ LEGO MINIFIGURE LUNGING POSITION
With the method above, you have put your minifigure into a very dynamic pose, ready to fight, but his legs are just standing there without much movement. So how could you make your warrior look like he is lunging forward for an epic battle? Since regular LEGO minifig legs are very limited in movement you will have to use another technique. In fact, you can achieve some really interesting poses with basic LEGO elements.
In the first picture I used three common LEGO pieces to achieve a position where it looks like the minifig is carefully creeping up on his enemy. For the second position I used five common LEGO elements to create a slightly different pose.
I hope this article gave you some ideas for posing your LEGO minifigures in interesting positions. Being creative and thinking outside the box with your LEGO brick can give you some surprisingly great results. What do you think? Have you used any of these methods in your own LEGO creations? Do you know other unique and interesting ways to pose LEGO minifigures? Feel free to share in the comment section below! Also, I’m a TFOL (Teen-Fan-of-LEGO) and this is my first post here at theBrickBlogger. Thanks for reading and feedback is welcome! 😉
And you might also like to check out the Building Techniques section for more tips, tricks and building techniques, or select from the following posts:
- Building with LEGO – Shapes & Mosaics
- Building with LEGO – Micro-Scale Building
- Building with LEGO – Picture Perfect Scenes
- Building with LEGO – Bases & Borders
- Building with LEGO – Beautiful Landscaping
- Building with LEGO – Customize Your Minifigs
- Building with LEGO – Buildings & Vehicles
- LEGO Building Technique: Forced Perspective
- LEGO Forced Perspective with a Twist
