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30 April 2020

LEGO® Trolls World Tour: Jonas Kramm's Temple of the Blue Sea

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Jonas Kramm returns today to reveal the alternate build he created using only sets from the controversial LEGO® Trolls World Tour theme!



My analysis of the new pieces in the LEGO® Trolls World Tour sets revealed many colourful elements so it’s no wonder that my alternative build turned out pretty flashy too. Let’s dive in and discover the Temple of the Blue Sea!


For this build I only used the bricks within five LEGO Trolls sets. There wasn’t really a way to use bricks from my collection anyway – I’m currently moving and, tediously, all my LEGO is packed up in boxes and more even boxes.



My resources were:
  • 41251 Poppy’s Pod: 103 pieces
  • 41252 Poppy’s Hot Air Balloon Adventure: 250 pieces
  • 41254 Volcano Rock City Concert: 387 pieces
  • and two copies of 41255 Pop Village Celebration: 380 pieces
This gave me a total number of 1120 pieces. Which is quite a lot, as I realized when I tried to spread all bricks on my table, but of course still with a lot of limitations both colour-wise and element-wise. For example I was surprised to not find a single cheese slope in any of these sets.

I started my build with the new teal elements. The Cylinder Quarter 4X4X6 especially caught my attention and as I had two Pop Village Celebrations I had eight of them to play with. Soon the idea a Bright Bluish Green/ Dark Turquoise pillar was growing and I decided to go with an underwater scene for my alt-build. On one hand I could make the best out of the unusual column colour and on the other hand it gave me the chance to use many of the Trolls figures’ elements as various sea flora and fauna.


The top of the high pillar was the first building challenge as I wanted to combine the arch bricks with 4X4 Round Brick Quarters, as they fit perfectly. The elements I had in mind to connect them weren’t available, so I tried out something different and ended up using leaves, which not only solve the issue but also make great details.



I used all the elements in teal I could find and didn’t hesitate to include some teal Trolls heads too.



The ocean floor is split into three colour groups: lavenderish, greenish and yellowish.

I heard there is an unwritten rule that every LEGO piece can be reused as some kind of coral, so I tried to prove that by using Trolls hairpieces, splat gears, horns, lightning bolts, hairbrushes and all kinds of plant pieces.




To (illegally) connect the new leaf pins from the pods, I built an upside down 2x4 brick into the ground.



The shipwreck was quite a challenge as there were only ten pieces available in brown. In a regular MOC I would have made it more detailed, but I’m surprised how good the simplicity of upside down arches work here.




To fill the scene with nautical life I added some tiny guitars from the new Trolls accessory bag as fish, and combined lime cherries with lavender eggs to create two hermit crabs.


For the jellyfish I made use of the long cables in Medium Lavender and the 3X3 Domes in Bright Reddish Violet/ Magenta (with the printing turned to the back). Squeezing the cables into the dome is surely no legal technique, but as they have soft ends it works very well.



And I almost forgot: I also built this little crab.

Originally it was to go with the diorama but as my girlfriend adopted it, to let the cute little guy sit on her desk, I missed integrating it for the photoshoot! So it gets its own picture here.

Unfortunately I didn’t include one of the new pods or big balloon pieces.




I had the idea to make a giant squid, but couldn’t pull it off, because I was missing enough joints. Anyway I’m happy how it turned out and glad I could finally try out building a coral reef.

And here is a 'behind the scenes' pic!



Do the new Trolls pieces inspire you to build? What would the pods turn into in your hands? I’m keen to read your ideas!




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Big up to our 'Vibrant Coral' patrons: Iain Adams, Geppy, Chris Cook, London AFOLs, Gerald Lasser, Big B Bricks, Dave Schefcik, David and Breda Fennell, Huw Millington, Neil Crosby, Antonio Serra, Beyond the Brick, Sue Ann Barber & Trevor Clark, and Kevin Gascoigne. You're all awesome!

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Products mentioned in this post were kindly supplied by the LEGO Group. All content represents the opinions of New Elementary authors and not the LEGO Group. All text and images are © New Elementary unless otherwise attributed.

15 comments:

  1. Crazy good! Jonas is a LEGO wizard!

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    1. Yeah, he'd still manage to kramm in a lot of stuff here... *Drum roll*

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  2. Wow, I don't think I ever would have thought of some of those building techniques. And yes, I agree that any piece could be used as coral, which you definitely proved. Very well done, Kramm!

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      I look forward to seeing someone design a coral reef using all of these parts. Don't worry, I stayed away from some of the truly tempting categories, like minifig parts, anything that Bricklink counts as "gear", paper/cardboard products, stickers, cloth, string, electrical wire, giant bricks, Duplo, Primo, Belville, Scala, Galidor, Bionicle, Hero Factory, and any tangential parts that aren't really System-compatible (like die-cast cars).

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    2. Haha, that definitely sounds like a challenge!

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    3. I'm willing to concede that it's probably a good thing that I don't run Iron Builder...

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  3. Fantastic - very inspiring!

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  4. That's amazing, Jonas, and I love the idea of combining parts from multiple sets in a theme the rebuild as a MOC, taking advantage of the shared color palette.

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    1. Great - because we have more of those coming!

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    2. Oh good! I'm already looking forward to that!

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  5. Hah! 24201. I finally figured it out. You said the quarter-round bricks were attached with leaves, but then right under that is a picture with one with a matching tile that has no leaf attached to it. It's been bugging me trying to figure out what piece you used, but there's no clear shots of that from the other side. So the low end has a hollow stud that attaches to the bar on the green plate, and the high end is what's attached to the underside of the curved brick.

    For being made with such a limited part selection, it's still better than a lot of coral MOCs I've seen that were made with the full range of parts available. The biggest mistake many people make is to group each type of corral together in equal-sized clumps that make it look like a tended garden. I don't know if I'll ever build another coral reef MOC, but I see a couple ideas in here that I may have to steal, like the upside-down cupcakes that look like limpets.

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    1. Tended garden? Don't you know that's what the mermaids do for leisure...

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    2. I'm actually serious about that. Look up pictures of coral, and it's all completely random. There's very little or no clumping. Often, you won't even see more than one instance of any type of coral that's visible in the photo, though that's partly due to visibility being significantly reduced even in shallow water.

      I'd long wanted to make a coral reef MOC. The Incredibles is my favorite Pixar movie, but I still regard Finding Nemo as their best film, and I love the explosion of color in the reef scenes. I'd seen other peoples' MOCs posted on occasion, but when I looked up images of real coral to get ideas, I realized how hard it is to make a realistic coral reef MOC. When I finally hit a point where I had a pressing reason to make one, it ended up only filling 28 studs of an 8x8 vignette, and the highest point is five bricks high. But in that tiny amount of space, I packed in seven distinct species of coral. The only instance where I repeated any of them is a small cluster of three tube corals.

      In this MOC, you can see three types of Troll hair that are somewhat clumpy, but one of those is the white hair where there's only two side-by-side. And there are a lot of other types of coral that are repeated randomly throughout the build, which really helps break up that "garden" look.

      Besides, everyone knows it's the octopus that does all the gardening...

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    3. Oh yeah, we don't pass him by! ...

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  6. Mesmerizing scene. Those colors are beautiful and the whole scene looks so full of life and natural curves. Amazing!

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