2017 Skærbæk Parts Festival: Microscale

Okay, it really is happening! Welcome to our Parts Festival, where we gave 60 LEGO® fans an hour to make whatever they liked using a range of new LEGO elements as 'seed' parts for their constructions. I'll post a handful every day for the next nine days. Hopefully some just might inspire you to get building! 

To kick things off I have selected some of the microscale constructions that the participants came up with. Microscale essentially means that the scale of the model is smaller than one that minifigures could inhabit.

To me this looks like a floating industrial island with traditional housing. Look carefully and you'll see that the builder has made use of the 3.18mm bar connection on the Black Fence 1X4X2 W/ Shaft No 1 (Element ID 6195092 | Design ID 32932) giving an impression of 'floating'.

2017 Skærbæk Parts Festival

On the last weekend of each September, the Skærbæk Fan Weekend brings together hundreds of LEGO® fans from dozens of countries for a few fun-filled days in a remote Danish coastal town. 2017's was the biggest yet, and on the Sunday morning New Elementary ran one of our 'live' parts festivals: a special workshop where, thanks to the LEGO Group, 60 AFOLs got their hands on some of the newest LEGO pieces to see what they could build within the space of an hour.

At long last I'm ready to show you what they made! Well, almost. Today I will introduce the parts I chose for the festival.

PdC Parts Festival: Day Three

Here are the results from the final day of our first ever live parts festival, where AFOLs from all over the world who were attending the Paredes de Coura (PdC) Fan Weekend last June were given just over an hour to come up with ideas of what might be possible using a range of new LEGO® parts. See the parts selection here.

Bill Ward

At the rear of his spaceship, Bill created rather neat vector thrust capability by creating oval shapes from pairs of Mudguard 3X4, W/ Plate, No. 1 (6178912 | 28326). I will show you a breakdown of this technique in my next post, when I explore the geometry of this part a little more deeply. 

PdC Parts Festival: Day Two

AFOLs from all over the world took part in our first ever live parts festival in June in Portugal at the Paredes de Coura (PdC) Fan Weekend. Each day, 15 builders had just over an hour to explore what might be done with a range of new LEGO® parts. See the parts selection here, but today let's look at what the second round of LEGO fans came up with.

Amy Fennell

PdC Parts Festival: Day One

Our first ever live parts festival (or "parts party" as regular reader Håkan put it!) took place in June in Portugal at the Paredes de Coura (PdC) Fan Weekend. Each day, 15 builders had just over an hour to explore what might be done with a range of new LEGO® parts. See the parts selection here, but today let's look at what the first round of LEGO fans came up with.

Michael Studman 

Yes, that's his real name. Jeal much?

Most of the seed parts are present in this characterful chihuahua! Funny, I never thought to use Boomerang (6153574 | 25892) as the structure of a dog's body...

PdC Parts Festival

Back in June, we had a first for New Elementary; our first ever live parts festival! We've run several online parts festivals in the past, where we take some of the newest elements released by the LEGO® Group and challenge builders to explore what they might be used for. This time around, regular contributor Jonas Kramm proposed that we run a workshop at the Paredes de Coura (PdC) Fan Weekend in Portugal to see what builders could come up with - in the space of an hour!

LEGO® House pre-opening event

The new experience centre/museum in Billund, LEGO® House, has now opened to the public but on Friday 22 September 2017 there was a special pre-opening event for hundreds of LEGO fans from around the world. I was lucky enough to be one of them, so here are some photos from the day. If you are planning to go yourself, you might consider any photos to be 'spoilers' but I am glad to report that there is just so much to do and enjoy inside LEGO House, the photos I'd seen beforehand really didn't spoil much for me and I trust this post won't either.

General manager of LEGO House Jesper Vilstrup welcomes us along with third-generation owner, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Behind them is a lenticular made of cheese slopes (Design ID 54200) that shows either the company motto or portraits of the four generations of family owners, depending where you stand.

Bricktastic: Alex Jones (Orion Pax)

One of the many who regularly display at Bricktastic, the LEGO® show in Manchester in aid of Fairy Bricks, is Alexander Jones works as a LEGO Model Designer for TT Games, so if you're into LEGO video games you've surely played with his models before. But Bricktastic provided the opportunity to see Alex play with his own models! Including Arcee, one of the Autobots from the Transformers franchise which is a favoured subject of his.

2017 Skærbæk Parts Festival: registration

Sorry, this event is now fully booked.

Are you already registered to come to Skærbæk Fan Weekend in Denmark in late September? If not, I am afraid you are too late for this year, folks... but if you are registered: New Elementary will be running a one-off special building workshop and we'd love you to come and build with some new elements!

Bricktastic 2017: Event videos

I shot a couple of quick videos on my phone at Bricktastic, the LEGO® show in aid of Fairy Bricks.

It was an awesome event! As you can see, plenty of people, but also plenty of space to move around. This was a deliberate move by the organisers to ensure people didn't get stressed by the crowds or feel they couldn't stop and stare at something for ages... like these amazing models....

Bricktastic 2017: event pictures

We're live from Manchester! Bricktastic, the event run by the wonderful charity Fairy Bricks, is underway and the quality of models is outstanding. It's a really relaxed event thanks to the generous space, carefully managed crowd numbers and the lack of doof-doof music!

Here's a very random look at some of the AFOL creations on display - sorry not to be more polished with this post, it's been hard to find the time. Enjoy!

Steve Deaville and Steph Cotter - The Odyssey (1980s animated series)

Competition: make a LEGO font

Entry is now closed. View the amazing entries we received!

It's high time we ran a competition. In the last year or so the LEGO® Group have released several new tiles, and they are very cool pieces. I want you to use them to create lettering, such as this example I designed digitally. You could win 250 new LEGO tiles!

Bricktastic 2017, Manchester UK

The third annual Bricktastic show takes place on the weekend of 1st and 2nd July at Manchester Central. Come along! And tell anyone you know who lives in the Northwest to get there too - it's worth travelling to experience this big, friendly LEGO show with a great atmosphere. Many of the UK's greatest AFOL builders make the effort to be there, because it is run by and in aid of Fairy Bricks, the wonderful charity who raise money to buy LEGO sets for children's hospitals.

I'll be there too! The New Elementary table will feature some of the amazing Nexogon models you're seeing from our talented UK builders, and Elspeth De Montes will be adding some colourful creations, no doubt injected with her colourful sense of humour.

Here's another of the amazing models that will premiere at the show; Jamie Douglas has expanded the official set 10253 Big Ben to show the entire Houses of Parliament!

NEXOGON: Coronae Softworks

Another of the 14 featured builders in our parts festival using LEGO® NEXO KNIGHTS™ piece 'Rotor w/ 4.85 hole' makes his premiere today: Christian Benito (a.k.a. Little Brick Root). He lives in Portland, Oregon, as do two other builders I chose... by sheer coincidence!

When my Nexogons arrived, I was in the midst of a pre-convention building frenzy and I barely had time to do a bit of fiddling. With the con behind me, I had a particularly interesting tablescrap that I just didn’t know how to use. It uses Nexogons to make a really interesting shape, but nothing has come of it yet. Then in one of Tim’s articles I saw six Nexogons arranged in a star. A building came together in my head and Coronae Softworks was born.

NEXOGON: Our parts festival begins

Our next parts festival, NEXOGON, is progressing nicely! The new LEGO® part 27255, a.k.a. "Plate, Modified 6 x 6 Hexagonal with Pin Hole" or "Rotor , w/ 4.85 hole, No. 1" or the "Combo NEXO Power shield" is found in several 2017 sets from the NEXO KNIGHTS™ range. Bulk amounts of this part are now on their way to 14 select builders around the world and indeed some of the builders have received them already. One of them, Gary Davis, was so excited he immediately sent me this picture... so I guess the festival is officially underway!

LEGO® boxes: are they important?

The LEGO® Group want to know what fans think about the way that premium, expensive sets are packaged. They've created a surprisingly detailed survey for everyone to use. As someone who saved LEGO boxes from an early age, I found it rather fun to complete! The survey closes on March 6, 2017.

Top 10 LEGO® parts and colours

The Pick and Build (PAB) walls found inside LEGO® Stores are extremely popular with AFOLs, being a great source of bulk parts. Choose a small or large cup and fill it with whichever parts you wish - well, whichever are available on the wall at the time. However with so many LEGO elements in existence and so few slots available on the walls, you're unlikely to find that exact piece you wanted, or that rare colour you need in bulk. That could change; a new initiative means that American fans might see more of what they really want in 2018.

Call for builders - get hexagonal!

In my previous post, I analysed the new hexagonal LEGO® plate (Design ID 27255) and discovered some of its potential, but I want to see more ideas, and more hexagonal plates! Therefore I'm planning another New Elementary parts festival called Nexogon, based around seeing what can be done with this element in bulk. I'll be relying on a few of the great builders who have helped out in the past but I also want some new faces in the lineup. If I sent you a few dozen of these, do you think you could do something amazing?

[EDIT: I have received so many applications, I've now closed the selection process and will decide soon - but you can still participate by using the hexagonal plates you've bought yourself. Read more below.]

LEGO® Leicester Square

You've most likely seen many pictures already of the new flagship LEGO® Store in Leicester Square, but I thought I would share mine too. These were taken the day before the official opening at the AFOL-only VIP event.

My favourite thing in the shop is this incredible diorama.

It's not flat; sections of it project outwards.

The New Black: Venice 1486

Having already designed many small models that highlight new LEGO® parts for The New Black parts festival, Jonas Kramm returns today with a fully-fledged MOC, which he built with another Jonas!

The parts festivals here on New Elementary are all about sharing ideas with the community as top how new parts can be used, and it is always great to see builders with unique building styles and ideas use the given parts in different ways.

So I was glad when I got visited by the talented Jonas (Brick Vader) one weekend in August to talk about the LEGO hobby and to inspire each other. We started building a small scene from the game “Assassin's Creed 2” that takes place in Venice in 1486 and it turned out to fit perfectly some of the details I already built with the new moulds. In addition we added further details that also feature these new parts.