Today we welcome guest Nathan Don (woomy_world), who is our final builder in After-Party Fest, our LEGO® building challenge using seed parts of interesting moulds released by LEGO over the last 12 months. Nathan's stunning work was selected for display until September 2025 at the prestigious LEGO House Masterpiece Gallery in Denmark, where Tim and Jonas met him at the time of installation. He then attended our Skaerbaek Fan Weekend building workshop, where these seed parts came from, and we sent him home to the US with a baggie to experiment with further!
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LEGO Sea Turtle
On the way home from Denmark, I had brought a few of the workshop parts in my carry-on for brainstorming between layovers.
The shaping of the squirrel tail immediately caught my eye as the perfect element for a turtle’s head. With this idea, I began trying to find ways to give the part a bar connection, as the bar/clip system tends to be my go-to, especially for smaller builds.
Due to the softer rubber material of the part, certain elements could be threaded through the minifigure waist holes. In particular, I found curved elements such as the hot dog (25994, 33078) and bent droid arm (55528, 30377, 49754, 86024) work best at this scale; however, longer straight bars such as 3L and 4L also work.
The Sea Turtle was the only MOC I made utilizing the squirrel tail, but I did end up finding another potentially useful connection involving an Exo-clip (3484) and the hollow portion of the tail. Perhaps it may be of some use for a future MOC.
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LEGO Badlands Dragon
As a character and creature builder, I tend to gravitate toward parts that can form interesting textures, and the Donkey Kong foot was the next element to catch my eye.
When placed side-by-side, they create an interesting scale texture, which instantly screamed dragon to me! However, I first needed to find a way to actually connect a pair together.
As the part has zero stud connections (only anti-studs), the easiest method would have been to utilize the ratchet connection and connect a modified plate to grant the foot a stud connection. However, this was too bulky for my use.
I ended up jamming a rubber LEGO® Technic flexible rubber double axle connector (45590) into the hollow underside of the foot and used the friction between parts as the sole connection. Then, I chained multiples of this assembly together with Technic rubber bands; therefore bypassing any need to connect each individual pair to an external frame.
The resulting connections and assemblies allowed me to save a ton of space and keep the body shaping slim for the dragon.
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LEGO Paelien and Peelysaur
Just as our ‘Mind that Banana’ contest ends, I’ll share two MOCs using the banana peel element.
At first glance, I found the part to be quite boring as far as connections go – only a bar hole and a bar. However, as a ‘parts-spam’ element (i.e. utilizing repetition), I quickly found its potential in the textures that could be made. Furthermore, the rubber material allowed it to be flexed – without the need for a flex tube.
The one caveat is that there still needs to be some sort of anchor at the ends to hold up the curve. The Paelien’s curve is held up by the surrounding scenery and foam friction.
Peelysaur’s spine uses a curved bar (4042) as the anchor. As a side note, Peelysaur actually uses all three types of bananas allowed in the contest… can you spot them all?
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See all entries to our Mind that Banana contest
Enraged LEGO Lawn Mower and Bridge
In contrast to the couple of connections provided by the banana peel, the Technic steering arm boasts a multitude of connections. However, for these two MOCs, I ended up focusing on the holes in the towball socket. Compared to older Technic steering arms, the holes in the towball socket can actually fit a bar!
The lawn mower further makes use of the shaping of the piece as the handle bar. I wasn’t satisfied with just building a regular lawn mower though, so I decided to give it a bit of character.
On the other hand, the bridge was a lot more technical. I was initially going to use some variant of the following connections to make space for the road detail and grill-tile railing; however, this ended up being unnecessary.
But let it be known, a through-hole stud (28626, 29387, 85861) can illegally be wedged into the hollow portion of the steering arm! Likewise, Technic pins also fit.
And because I spent more time than I care to admit on this bridge, here’s a close-up of offset galore.
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Tablescraps
Most of my scraps ended up becoming MOCs, but I did have one scrap leftover involving the LEGO® NINJAGO® dragon wings.
The goal for this scrap was to figure out how to make a larger wing out of the individual ones. I ended up chaining a few of them with Technic rubber bands as they kept the wings closer together than bar connections. Alas, this did not go anywhere.
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Conclusion
As an avid follower of the blog, I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with Tim and my fellow contributors on this parts festival. It was a nice change of pace to work on some smaller MOCs and really try to spotlight each part in a build!
READ MORE: After-Party Fest: introducing the elements, and techniques from Tom Loftus
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Some very nice builds, especially the Badlands Dragon and the lawn mower.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the larger mushroom piece in the Paelien and Peelysaur build?
Nevermind, that must be the hat from the Mushroom Sprite cmf
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