Brotherroach

Hi, you can call me Roach or Brer Roach if you're a hick like me. Born in Africa, raised in the mountains of NC, and recently left the United States Navy after serving for five years. I'm a bit of a geographical mixup, haha. My family was poor growing up, being immigrants and all and I didn't have a lot of lego but what I did have I cherished. My greatest treasure was a first print english edition of the Ultimate Lego Book, which I still have. I promised myself when I got out I would buy myself a bunch of lego and make the collection I always wanted as a kid. Doing pretty good so far. My interests Legowise are set and theme design, writing in whatever capacity I can, and modding mini-dolls. I love the Lego Friends sets but hope that the dolls can be used for something besides the tired tropes that lego trots out with every inheritor to Paradiso. I also love the old Adventurers and Rock Raiders sets, and am currently obsessed with the Lego Movie as a testament to good script writing. Outside of Lego, I like writing, woodworking, architecture, and fashion. I'm going to college soon, I can't wait to be a 24 year old freshman, haha.

Thank you everyone! I'm enjoying the site so far and hope that my contributions will help enrich the site.

So I decided I'd put five years experiences as a nuclear mechanic and my ammased collection of craft tools to use in making the lego friends minidolls something I want to play with. I'm going to start by listing the things Iike about the minidolls, and then the reasons I feel a need to take saw and drill and scalpel to them. Likes: -Proportions are well done, and they scale with legos very well. They're only a little bit taller than minifigs, so you can build on minifig scale with them. -Hair pieces are really neat, and the little pegholes allow for another level of customization. I mean, right now it's just flowers and bows (not that there's anything wrong with either of these, mind) but as long as you can fit a peg small enough to fit in the hole, the sky is the limit! -The heads are really cute! I like them a lot! Things to achieve through modding: -Greater level of articulation. Specifically I'm looking just to attain minifig levels of articulation (legs and hands) but the dimensions of their waists as well as the relative thickness of the dress pieces at knee level give me ideas... -Different, sometimes fantastic options for appearance. I like fantasy and sci fi, and don't see any reason that these things are unattainable with the friends figures. TLG has said the the Friends are going to be around for a while (and why not, the sets are selling very well) so I say, why should the minifig be the only thing treated to crazy ninja battles and tomb raiding? I like heartlake, but I don't want to partition off the minidoll to just that one area. So! To start off, I'd like to introduce you to my space monkeys: I call them that because they're probably going to be sacrificed in the name of knowledge. I've never modded before and I'm learning as I go along. I have a certain fondness for them, since their inevitable destruction will lead to my gaining the knowledge to not damaging any other minidolls. It's a bit tragic. So I decided to name them. The collection of pieces you see here belong to Minki, my first space monkey. With her, I decided to experiment with the use of pins cut from an appropriate guage wire to give her movable arms and legs. I started by cutting the hands as close as I could to the wrist and then using putty to fill in the the faces damaged by the saw. A fine grade sandpaper smoothed out the mating ends of the arms. Drilling and pin placement are nerve wracking at best. My tips for this would be: First, mark the center of whatever you'll be drilling with a fine tipped marker, /always/ drill a pilot hole with a smaller bit as far along the arm as you can, then drill the pinhole. With Minki, I cut the arm and hand off before drilling, but I think I'll get a better mating area if I drill through the hand and arm before cutting, and then fill the hole in the hand with putty. I'll be trying that on the next test subject. Still, I was able to reattach her hands without any horrific damage done to her person. I consider this a success. Attaching her /legs/ was a different manner all together. The lego friends hip part has a huge hole in the middle, but the legs are held in place by these tiny little nubs. It's a bizarre setup, honestly. Why not just put a peg through that big hole and attach the legs like that? Whatever. This introduces a few problems. First, short pins cannot be used since they have nothing to attach to. So I taped the two legs two the hip and drilled a hole all the way through before inserting a pin that went all the way through from leg to the other. This holds them together, but they want to move at the same time since the pin is essentially an axle. Still, articulation was achieved. I also carved and shaped the legs to make them more leg-like. A coat of primer was added. Tentative designs for Minki and her friend, Momo. These are just guides, as minidolls are tiny and I'm just starting out with this painting stuff. Minki's first layer of color. The torso is to have three colors to it when it's done, not including white. I'll naturally keep you guys posted. Minki's an experiment, and not so much a toy, but I grow fond of her as I continue to remake her. I don't know if I'll keep her or sell her, but I think I'm going to make a diorama just for the space monkeys, something permanent and beautiful so the fragility borne of their experimental nature isn't compromised.

So on tumblr, there's a few artists who got really hype about the lego movie and are producing some really great art for it. I'm a (rank) amateur artist, and I like seeing pictures of legos as well as just legos. The figures are really cute and easily fit cartoony expression. So... this page is mostly me hilighting other artists doing really great art featuring legos. This will probably be Lego Movie heavy. So first artist on the list: Billy Buckaroo! She's a talented artist with a real knack for cartoony design and movement. She also really. REALLY. Likes lord business. I highly recommend checking out her other stuff aside from Lego, which can be seen here. But, here's the stuff worth posting up here, a sampling of some of her best stuff, in my opinion. Some choice good cop/bad cop interracting with other characters, including the best character in the movie, the chair. Her self insert fan character (fan figure?) in three different outfits: her work outfit, her civilian outfit and her cloud cuckooland outfit, which she considers her master builder alter ego. Really cool stuff! Like I said, she really likes Lord Business. Also, picture of the other best character in the movie, Bizniss Kitty! Here is a link to her lego only tag as well. There's lots of gifs and image posts, along with her lego centric fanart. I'll probably be doing this for other artists as they come along my monitor.

This... Mostly this.

I just started up a thread specifically chronicling my forays in customizing my minidolls. You can have a look here.

I love the minidolls but these are super cute! I'd love to have these in my collection as well as my minidolls. Honestly, as much as I love the prints on the Friends heads, I've always preferred the regular mini figure head. It's so cute, and it's conducive to so many faces and expressions! You pulled these off really well, especially with the different eyes, it makes for great variability between the figs.