Nyundi

HAHAHA! This is just a joy to look at! Are those incinerated horses from the crash?? :laugh:

A friend and I were just discussing this with my wife no more than a month ago (his wife was nowhere to be found at the time!). They are planning to have children soon, within two years, whereas we are looking more in the five year category. We basically concluded that "daddy's legos" are hands-off until they reach a certain age where they can understand and appreciate the collection and the sorting involved. I have every intention however of purchasing them their own sizable collection that I will not supervise at all (well beyond obvious safety supervision). As a child I had no restrictions on what I did with my lego, and although I rarely did anything that was damaging (breaking, losing etc.), I would have been able to without a parent leering over my shoulder telling me how that minifig "might be worth something someday". I think that sort of practice would probably stunt imaginative growth, and although in years to come they may regret chopping up a few figs here and there, the critical developmental play that they got as a result of being free to do this is more than worth it. I'll almost certainly have to adapt my plan, and I am willing to share my collection if that is the right thing to do... but as it stands, my current plan is: "one castle for you, one castle for me"

I'm glad someone else mentioned this. When I first saw this article I thought I was having some serious deja vu. I was scratching my head saying "I swear this happened before... but seriously, what are the chances??" :alien:

Haha! Should we call this "Cynical Social Commentary in LEGO Form", or just a an editorial cartoon with a very limited audience Either way it is both true and funny!

There are two images on bricklink, but I doubt they are good enough for what you want: Sticker Sheet 1 Sticker Sheet 2

Hi Duck! Check out Bricklink. You can find tons of sellers selling individual pieces, sometimes in great quantities. The website isn't the most straightforward, but once you get the hang of it, you can make a wanted list, basically saying "I need 10 cannons and 100 black 1x1 tiles", then ask it to find a store that has those available, and sort by price ;) All of the sellers are independent, like eBay. There is a feedback system, and it is international! Enjoy

Partly to be funny I suppose, and partly because it would be a recognizable image to the community!

Greetings everyone! I thought I'd throw out a tutorial on how to use Photoshop to create a photorealistic mosaic using your LEGO element of choice! I hope this is of use to someone out there who would like to make a large mosaic but isn't quite sure where to start! What this tutorial is about: In this tutorial I'll use an image taken off the web, some information from http://www.bricklink.com, and Photoshop CS2 to create a guide or "map" for building the imagine into a LEGO mosaic! What you will need: For most people, the hurdle here will be a copy of Photoshop. There are plenty of other solid image editing platforms available, I'll be showing how to do this step by step with Photoshop, but chances are the same effects can be replicated with any other "real" image editing programs (not touch-up programs that may come for free with your camera or computer). Beyond this, you will need to have a photo or digital image of some sort to use as your template, and a large selection of identically sized LEGOs to work with. In this example, I'll be using the color palette available with 1x1 bricks; this can easily be modified to use 2x2 bricks, 1x1 plates, 1x1 tiles, etc. The choice of element is up to you, and I'll show you how to narrow your color palette based on the element you choose in a bit! Getting started: For my example, I'll use an image that should be familiar to all of us here on Eurobricks, our friendly admin Hinckley, apparently on a roller coaster! I pilfered this image straight from the webpage, and opened it immediately in Photoshop. The first task is to decide how large of a mosaic you want to make. This can be the most important decision of the whole process as this will have a huge impact on how many pieces you will need, more so than you might imagine! In any event, select a suitable size for your collection. At this point we'll want to resize the image so that each pixel of the image is equivalent to a stud in your mosaic. For this example, I'll be reducing the size of this image from 100x100 (meaning 10,000 total studs!!) to 25x25 (or a mere 625 studs). To accomplish the image resize, I'll select the [image] menu, and choose [image Size...]. From there, I'll enter the Width and Height desired in the boxes, and select [Ok]. To bring this image into a clearer mosaic-esque focus, zoom the image in a good amount, 1600% should be sufficient. This overall process of image resizing, followed by a zoom will make my window in Photoshop look like the following three windows in order: Adjusting the color palette: At this point, the image is already starting to look like a mosaic, but this is simply the beginning of the process. Now we have what Photoshop can approximate as the original colors of the image, after it has been substantially reduced. But these colors are not necessarily equivalent with the color palette of LEGO elements that we'll want to use. What we need to do is define a custom palette of colors that is specific to LEGO, and apply this to the image, forcing Photoshop to match the existing colors to the closest available colors of our beloved ABS. To do this, first we need to determine what components we want to use to construct our mosaic. For this example, I will be using 1x1 bricks, but you can adjust the steps to suit your needs! In order to adjust our color palette, we have to know what colors are even available in our chosen element. To find this out, I'll use the catalog resource available on www.bricklink.com: -Navigate to www.bricklink.com -Select the Catalog tab -In the top search area, select Brick from the drop down labeled --- All Categories --- and click [Go!] -Select the first element in your list, the 1x1 brick (3005) -In the top right corner, click on (View Them) next to the word Sets -The first list now will show all of the colors that this part has been constructed in, it should look like this: Now that we know what colors we have available to us, we can construct our color table for the image. Back in Photoshop, we can choose [image], then [Mode] and finally [indexed Color...]. The menu you select should look like this: This will bring up the Indexed Color window: Before we begin to edit the color table, we must make one quick change to the options. Be sure your Dither mode is set to None. Now we can edit the color table and have the desired effect! From the first drop down (Palette), select [Custom...], which will bring up the window: At this point, you will need to load in the colors of the elements available to you. One method to do this is to clear the current color table, and select entirely new colors. An easier method, if you plan on using 1x1 bricks, is to download the saved color table I used for this tutorial from my brickshelf (LegoColorPalette.act). Whether you start from scratch, or from the table provided, you may want to edit your table to remove the possibility that Photoshop will use certain colors. For instance, you may not have any Light Pink 1x1 bricks, so why give Photoshop the option to use it? It can simply be removed and Photoshop will use the next closest available color should the need arise. Further, new colors may be available in the future, and you may want to add new ones to your table. To remove colors from the table, hold down the COMMAND key (on Mac OS X... I apologize, I'm not sure what the hotkey is when working in a Windows environment). The cursor will become a "scissors" icon. Simply click on the color to have it removed. To add a color to the table (or change an existing one), click on the color and the color selection window will appear. Select the color you want! (Advanced Tip: during this time, all Photoshop windows outside of this window will have the Eyedropper Tool enabled; this means you can simply click on a color in another Photoshop window and you will automatically get that color. This is particularly useful if you make an image of the colors available from Bricklink, as above, and open it in Photoshop first. Doing so will let you select the color without having to "approximate".) Once you have your color table loaded and edited to your desire, select [OK] and close both popup windows. And guess what has happened?! Photoshop has now applied the limited color selection to your existing image, essentially forming your image into LEGO-only colors! It should look something like this: Constructing the mosaic: Now it's time to actually put the mosaic together. To make life a little easier (how can it get any easier?!?!), you can turn on a visual grid over your image, to make it really obvious where each stud belongs. To do this, first you need to set the resolution of your grid to be 1 pixel square. Select [Photoshop] then [Preferences] and finally [Guides, Grid & Slices]. The selection path should look like: This will bring up the preferences window. In this window, find the area labeled Grid, and set the Gridline and Subdivisions to 1, and the Gridline unit to pixels. Now, to turn on your grids, select [View] then [show] and finally be sure that [Grid] is checked. It should look like this: This will make your window look like the example below: Wow! Now we're talking!!! At this point it's just a matter of following the map. Pull out your 1x1 studs and start building. When it's all said and done, you'll have something like this (note I faked a few of the colors as I ran out of reddish brown and light pink!): If I zoom the image out (ie. back away) it will become a little more clear (with the original for comparison): Now I have a nice mosaic of Hinckley riding in a roller coaster that I can hang on my wall! Conclusion: Although this tutorial may get a little deep into areas of Photoshop you may not have delved yet, it does provide a really clever way of having your computer plot your LEGO mosaic for you from an existing image. Also remember that the higher resolution you work on, the more bricks you will need, but the clearer the image will be... the example I made is 25x25, an extremely low resolution, and the results show I hope that this has been helpful and informative! MOSAIC ON!!!

Great raffle! Good luck to everyone (but better luck to me )!!

I do not! But only because I hadn't heard of this site before Very interesting, I'll have to investigate further!

I love your ducks! I've never seen that technique before, did you come up with that yourself?

Lucky for me, my wife already knows that our first house will be having a lego room. In fact, whenever we talk (seriously or jokingly) about other luxury rooms, they are always "next to the lego room".

Haha! Chickens... About 15 years ago (maybe more) a group of truly free range chickens decided to setup camp in an old shed near my parent's house. They literally just showed up one day and didn't leave for a year. We didn't feed them (although they got into the compost so I guess that pretty much counts). There were 2 roosters... one was clearly dominant, and about 6 or 7 hens. No idea where they came from, no clue where they went when they left. My mother, being a professional artist, did many ridiculous paintings of them. I had one hung in my loft until about 6 months ago when she called and asked me to send it to her (she had a client who liked some of the others and wanted to see all of them). Those chickens were a funny lot. Never ceased to amaze me how they could stand outside in the negative temperature during a blizzard, literally standing in water as it froze around their feet. Strange creatures!

Nobody seems to be picking up on this interesting word usage here: "collectible". Is it possible that they intend this theme more of a collectible game type thing... buying booster packs of monsters, and mini-figures that have randomly inserted elements with varying scales of rarity (like CCGs)? This makes sense given that the theme seems sorta odd, and yet they are going to throw huge amounts of marketing behind it. If so, watch out wallet, you're about to be drained (Of course I could be reading way to much into this!)

Count me in! And thanks so much for the generosity!!

So this is a little more challenging, if you think about it, than it first appears. Sure, limiting yourself to $50 sounds pretty rough, but it's even worse when you consider the consequences! Many great sets in the $50 range totally lose their charm without the $10 and $20 sets to back them up. And many $10 and $20 sets just aren't that great as stand alone sets. (Well, they are, but when you consider that you have practically nothing else to mix and match with them, they start to dwindle a bit). So you need to find a few good sets that work well together, and add enough useful (non <insert that tiresome argument>) pieces to flex creativity. To boot, keep in mind you'll be stuck on a desert island... you aren't like to have a table to build on, or organizers to store things in. Finally, you don't want too many really tiny pieces... I imagine if you dropped one in the sand its likely to disappear for good! Also, nothing battery operated, unless you want the fun to die in a week That being said, here are my selections: 5612 Police Officer 5613 Firefighter 5620 Street Cleaner 7731 Mail Van 6177 Lego Basic Bricks Deluxe 626 Large Green Baseplate Coming in at $49.50. This selection would give me a plate to build on (taking care of the table) a large box to store it all in, but with a big enough opening to root around in it (from the bricks deluxe set), over 700 pieces, four minifigs and some accessories (and a dog). There are wheels to make a vehicle, and plenty of basic bricks to do all sorts of things with. And as a bonus, the sweeper piece that comes with the street cleaner is really fun to touch!

Really tight design! Well done

As did I. That makes three of us, so I suppose it has to be done now...

I just had a great experience with Chalet-Go-Play in the US. No complaints here!!

Happy birthday indeed! As much as I love to make MOCs, the minifig (and accessories) are what consistently excite me about new sets !!

If he's heavily into minifig customization, then what about something from BrickForge or BrickArms? If he likes castle stuff, BrickForge is probably better. You could probably have anything you purchased shipped directly to him too!

Haha, thats some... um... classic advice! You could get the same effect without the struggling and potential brain damage by using a pin drill: Pin Drill They can be found at hobby stores and craft stores, and are generally inexpensive. I would recommend, if looking for one, to get one with a swiveling head (you place it in your palm and it feels very natural to use), and also one that can take different sized drill bits. Then you can match a drill bit perfectly to the size of the rod. Even an inexpensive drill bit should plow through that thin little piece of ABS in a second ps: aaggh what have you done to that poor minifig!!!

I like it! Clever use of parts for the entire hips/legs assembly. (Also, I like the "flying stand" too!)

Fun! :thumbup: Love the bathing suits too

Great! I'm getting married in September and have been planning to use two minifigs as cake toppers (it was actually her idea!!). I also convinced her to let me include a small assortment of Legos in our welcome basket for out of town guests. I haven't quite figured out what I'll be putting in there, but it should be fun either way