(Written by Geneva – gid617)
One huge aspect of the LEGO hobby is building your own creations. And when it comes to building, there are as many styles, techniques, tips, and tricks as there are LEGO builders! 🙂
About six years ago, I built, photographed, and shared online my first MOC (My-Own-Creation), and since then I haven’t looked back! On average, I build upwards of one creation a week. In six years, that’s more creations than I would care to count! Over the years I’ve spent as a LEGO builder, I’ve tried out dozens of techniques for building all kinds of different scenes. Many of these techniques were suggested by other builders, others are combinations of multiple ideas, or tweaks to established methods made necessary by a lack of parts. And then again, once in a while comes that eureka moment and I manage to invent something on my own!
Like any other skill, learning how to be a great LEGO builder isn’t something that happens overnight. For a few people, it only takes a couple months. For others (like me!) it takes years. But what I’ve always found to be one of the most helpful things in improving my creations has been the suggestions, techniques, and tutorials shared by other builders. So I’m trying to give back by sharing on my blog some of the things I’ve learned!
Trees are a tricky subject to build in bricks, but they’re also useful for all kinds of creations. At the same time, there’s a huge variety of trees – and tree-building techniques – out there! So I decided to start off with “Tree Trials,” a series of three posts on tree building: 8 Ways to Build a LEGO Palm Tree, 7 Secrets for Deciduous Trees, and Majoring in Micro.
What’s unique about my tutorials, or how-to posts (or whatever you prefer to call them), is that instead of focusing on one technique and breaking it down step-by-step, what I’ve tried to do is cover a wide variety of possibilities to give you some good inspiration. It’s rare that a builder happens to have the exact pieces on hand to try out someone else’s technique. What I’ve always found more inspiring than the techniques themselves are the possibilities they hint at. Maybe someone builds a tree using clip pieces to angle the branches. That can inspire me to try using ball joints, or droid arms, or what have you! So my goal isn’t just to give you one way to build a tree, but to show lots of examples, and hopefully get your creative juices going!
After the series on trees, I wrote Floors Galore for Your LEGO Home. Again, the article touches on a wide variety of floor possibilities. It’s great to have a broad repertoire to choose from. After all, there are so many different types of floors in real life, and it’s exciting to depict that in a LEGO creation!
For my tutorials, I’ve taken examples only from my own builds (although on occasion I’ve linked to other builders’ creations). So these represent things that I’ve tried out, often many times!
Lastly, I wrote a article on Making Waves: Water with LEGO Bricks. While that post represents only a small smattering of the dozens of ingenious ways LEGO builders have come up with to create water, hopefully it’s enough to inspire you!
These five tutorials I mentioned above (palm trees, deciduous trees, micro trees, floors, and water) are all I’ve written so far, but I hope to continue sharing more on my blog in the future. Did you find them helpful? If there’s anything specific you’d like to see covered, don’t hesitate to ask! Or maybe you’ve got some techniques of your own you would like to discuss. Feel free to share and discuss in the comment section below! 😉
And you might also like to check out the following related posts:
