Book review: The Unofficial LEGO® Color Guide

We love LEGO® colours here at New Elementary and know it is an important topic for many of you too. A reference book, The Unofficial LEGO Color Guide by Christoph Bartneck, was first released late in 2017 with a second edition in July 2018. We sent a copy to LEGO colour aficionado Ryan Howerter (creator of LEGO colour resources like Brick Colorstream) to see what it offers.

There is a definite need in the AFOL community for LEGO® color references, whether for BrickLink sellers to verify the color of parts they’re listing, artists to match RGB values to brick colors, or geeks like me who like data and historical information just because. This book is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to make that information available in a physical format for easy reference, but it unfortunately misses the mark on several points.

LEGO® Ideas Review: 21317 Steamboat Willie

The next LEGO® Ideas set, 21317 Steamboat Willie, marks the 90th anniversary of the most famous cartoon character ever, Mickey Mouse. His fame was sparked in the 1928 black-and-white animated short film called Steamboat Willie which was also the first Disney film to have synchronized sound. Let's steam ahead with Mickey and take a look at the set that will be available from 1st April 2019 priced US $89.99/CA $119.99/DE €89.99/UK £79.99 and contains 751 parts.

The original LEGO Ideas proposal was submitted in 2016 by Máté Szabó who lives in Budapest and is an animator. The proposal hit the 10k votes mark in July last year and it was only revealed that the proposal would become a set last month when the review results were announced. Clearly a lot has been going on behind the scenes as the set has evolved into a larger, functional, impressive version of the original proposal. Let's take a closer look.

Contest: closing date extended

We're extending the closing date of our 'Build & Fix' LEGO® building contest! You now have until 11:59pm GMT on Monday 8 April 2019 to upload your entries. That's more than three weeks away, so there's even time to start your build now if this is the first you've heard of our competition – or if you have, create yet more entries!

New Elementary launched on Patreon

We've been working on an exciting new offering that's now live: the New Elementary Patreon page. This blog will continue as always, publishing for free the quality original content about LEGO® parts that you've come to know and love. Patreon is now your opportunity to support the work we do – and as a bonus, get access to exclusive extras every month on our Patreon feed.

LEGO® Gears: from Samsonite to splat!

When we first saw the images of LEGO® sets due to be released in 2019, one new type of element caught our eye in particular.  Because of their shape we affectionately called this group of elements 'splat' gears, but BrickLink call them Modified Plate with Gear Teeth / Flower Petals, and the official TLG name is Gear Wheel.

Today we take a closer look at these new elements and their place in the history of the LEGO gear. It turns out there is more to LEGO gears than just Technic; they have appeared in various guises over the years including DUPLO, Dacta and Samsonite. Before we take a look back at the ancestors, let's take another look at the new gears on the block.

Old Elementary: Duncan gets fly with Insectoids

One of our New Elementary parts festival builders, Duncan Lindbo, casts his mind back to an old LEGO® element that may well be familiar to fans who were youths during the 1990s. Remember the Insectoids? Well, Duncan does.

For many AFOLs, the late 1990s were a low point in set design. They think there were too many overly specialized parts, and they’re not entirely wrong… but because of that, there’s a lot of interesting parts that tend to get ignored by the AFOL community. Today, we’re going to explore a couple of Transparent Blue [TLG]/Trans-Dark Blue [BL] elements from the Insectoids line (1998-1999).

Contest: Build and Fix inspiration from Kev Levell

We are running a LEGO® building contest going on at the moment using the new spaceship hull piece from LEGO 4+ sets as the seed part. Prizes are The LEGO® Movie 2 sets. Hopefully your experiments are well underway and we've received many entries already. We're not revealing any until after the contest ends (8 April 2019) however our friend Kev Levell has sent us something to inspire you. (He has decided not to enter the contest.)

Now, although Kev has built us a spaceship don't think that this is solely a spaceship-building contest. Indeed we are primarily looking for inventive uses of this new element, so while spaceships are of course welcome you may prefer to build something quite different. 

I was lucky enough to get The LEGO® Movie 2 set 70821 Emmet and Benny's ‘Build and Fix' Workshop before Christmas. I immediately loved the new hull part (Design ID 43979) and ordered a couple extra of them as soon as I could. Affectionately, I’ve been thinking of this piece as Big Ugly Space Hull (BUSH), which amused me. Sorry.

I had been tinkering with a spaceship design using 43979 when I saw New Elementary post the “Build and Fix” competition calling for models that used this new element as a seed part. This is a very quick, very simple model using three of them to show how cool the BUSH is (for Classic Space enthusiasts at least).

Bricks & Pieces: Jonas’ Highlights - February 2019

You may recall Jonas Kramm has decided to curate monthly lists of cool parts available from “Bricks & Pieces”, The LEGO Group’s service for individual new LEGO® elements, to save you checking the price and availability of the wanted pieces one by one. He's so nice! Here is his February update.

After receiving great feedback on my January list I have now added the highlights of Bricks & Pieces in February. As always you can find it on:

BnP.jonaskramm.com

2018 Parts Fest #2: Peter's Bloodborne beast and Vera Kamsha scene

In his second post, Russian builder Peter Guz showcases two more fantastic creations using the LEGO® elements we sent him for our parts festival.

When I saw candle parts, I imagined long and pale creepy fingers. I thought, who could have such fingers? I love the PlayStation game Bloodborne so much, and there are a lot of creepy creatures with cool designs in it. Vicar Amelia is one of the bosses, and the last high cleric of the Healing Church. She could not resist the curse of the old blood and became a beast.

2018 Parts Fest #2: Peter's Post Apocalyptic World and Flying Fortress

We are continuing with our ongoing LEGO® parts fest and welcome our penultimate guest builder, an extraordinarily talented young builder from Russia, Peter Guz. We are huge fans of Peter's work, but even we did not anticipate the creations Peter made in a short space of time with a parcel of elements we sent.  Peter is a builder of few words but his images speak for themselves. This is the first of two posts by Peter.

“Lanterns have to light” thought I at first. And then I found the mecha leg Elspeth made using a Lantern in the blog post Enlightening Elements. I realised that I must complete it and build a light-up Lantern mech using Black Lamp, No. 1 (Element ID 6227901 | Design ID 37776).