Christopher Hoffmann's Ma.K MOC using 42156 PEUGEOT 9X8 24H Le Mans Hybrid Hypercar

We invited Christopher Hoffmann to choose a LEGO® set with inspiring new parts to add to his collection and create his own MOC. Today he reveals his work, with a masterclass insight into the creative process, and the elements and techniques he used.

As I thumbed through the catalogue of sets to review, my inspiration was immediate and specific. It was September 2023 and the most wonderful time of the year, Ma.Ktoberfest, was just around the corner. Set 42156 PEUGEOT 9X8 24H Le Mans Hybrid Hypercar, released 4 months prior, beckoned to me with the perfect ingredients for the theme: a range of new Technic panels in dark stone grey.

Bug Fest: MOCs from kekenoji, Ikuse Ryouji, and Takamichi Irie

The last instalment of our Bug Fest crescendos with three more MOCs from three more inspirational builders. Kekenoji, Ikuse Ryouji, and Irie Takamichi, all have wildly different building styles and each approached this challenge in a different way.

Bug Fest: Tary's MOCs

Our latest Parts Festival, Bug Fest – where we've sent LEGO® Ideas 21342 The Insect Collection to five amazing builders and asked them to create original models – continues today! 

Tary (@nobu_tary on Twitter and Instagram) is famed for his LEGO food and robot builds, and his Bug Fest builds do not disappoint! Let's see what he has to offer.

Bug Fest: Moko's MOCs

For our latest Parts Festival we've added the bricks from LEGO® Ideas 21342 The Insect Collection to the collections of five amazing builders, and asked them to create original models. Welcome to Bug Fest!

Kicking the fest off today is Moko, a master of nice parts usage (NPU). Indeed, one of his Bug Fest MOCs really puts the 'P' into NPU...

Modulex manuals, brochures and catalogues

We wanted to tell you about a new online resource that collates various historical printed information about Modulex. If you’re unfamiliar with Modulex, it was a separate building system that was introduced by The LEGO Group in the 1960s, intended for scale modelling and project planning.

The Modulex Library has been collated by Ryan Howerter, including scans by Karyn Murphy, Bailey Fullarton and Karwik. Please note that the site is not affiliated with The Modulex Group, and that the scans are archived for historical reference only and are not to be used commercially. 

Our contest winners: Construction Constructions

It's time to announce the winners of our Construction Constructions contest, where we asked our readers to use construction-themed LEGO® elements to build something non-construction industry related.

You can check out all entries in our gallery, or carry on just to see the winners here!

Contest: Construction Constructions

Submit your entry here

It’s contest time! We want you to design a LEGO® model that includes one or more elements traditionally associated with the construction industry – like the digger scoop, girder and the hardhat. The catch? The subject of your creation must not be construction industry-related! 

2022 Skærbæk Workshop

In September, it was such a thrill to return to the wonderful Skærbæk Fan Weekend in Denmark, 3 years on... like nothing had happened... and run another of our popular LEGO® building workshops! 50 participants from around the world were given 100 minutes to build whatever they liked – they simply had to include one or more of the special selection of 2022  elements that we provided. Bucketloads of random parts were also provided, and as you can imagine it's quite the challenge. Especially first thing on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night in Skærbæk.

Get a closer look at what they came up with later in the article - and we hope that it inspires your own building!

Our contest winners: Make a Wishbrick

It's time to announce the winners of our Make a Wishbrick contest, where we asked readers to dream up  ideas for a new LEGO® element - and then build it out of existing LEGO parts. We received an astonishing 276 entries, making this a tough one for our judges to decide as there could only be three recipients of a 10497 Galaxy Explorer and one winner of the top prize - 76218 Sanctum Sanctorum!

Contest: Make a Wishbrick

Contest now closed

It’s contest time! Did you know that there are more than 3700 unique LEGO® elements in the official LEGO inventory? That’s a big selection, but do you ever feel that it’s just not enough?

We’d love to see what new original part you could dream up, and to make this contest more challenging, we’re getting a bit meta: we want to see your dream element built out of LEGO bricks.  

Thanks to support from the LEGO Group, you could win a Sanctum Sanctorum or Galaxy Explorer!

LEGO® Brick Sketches: Interview with Chris McVeigh

Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano su ITLUG

Chris McVeigh, now a LEGO® Designer after many years as a freelance creative and fan, spoke to us at Fan Media Days about the new range just announced: LEGO Brick Sketches.

Chris, can you start by giving us a bit of a rundown on how this new series of models that you originally designed as a fan came to be an official product? Did you bring it to LEGO or did they suggest it to you? Because a few people have been like, “oh, we saw that coming. That's why TLG hired him…"

Chris: It certainly wasn't like that! Everything I've done with the company has been by the standard processes... there hasn't been any anything that's just like "hey yeah, let's do this because we like what you do”. So it was me who brought it to the company. When you first get to LEGO, every day, every week, it's a new adventure. So after I had been there a couple of months, people started to get excited about this event. It’s what we call Creative Boost, and it's where we designers can propose different ideas and whatnot. And I thought, I don't have time, I'm invested in what I'm doing right now, I’ll just have to wait until the next one... but towards the end of week, I said to myself, no, just remake some of your Brick Sketches!

Switch My Lantern Up: The winners

It is finally time to reveal which five LEGO® creations from our contest, Switch My Lantern Up, will be receiving the prizes of LEGO® Fiat 500s! We were going to announce them yesterday but it has been such a tough one to judge, and there were 88 models submitted using the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581).

This time the judges were Victor Pruvost and Tim Johnson from New Elementary, and none other than the LEGO Senior Designer who actually designed the lantern piece, Esa Nousiainen! We were honoured to have him and he was really impressed with what he saw:

Switch My Lantern Up: The entries (Vol. 3)

Today we reveal the final 25 entries to our LEGO® building contest, where you had to find a new use for the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581). The judges' decisions will be published on Saturday, unless we argue about it for too long! Hard when there are so many awesome ideas!

Old Diving Suit by GSCLD

Switch My Lantern Up: The entries (Vol. 2)

Today we continue revealing the entries to our LEGO® building contest, where you had to find a new use for the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581). Let's see what the next 30 entries were!

Peacock by Krakenbrix

In this build, I used the seed part as feathers for a peacock. The feathers are attached to a wedge belt tire (part 2815 and 4185) to obtain the radial design.

Switch My Lantern Up: The entries (Vol. 1)

Our LEGO® building contest, where you had to find a new use for the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581) has now closed, so while our judges are getting all judgey and deciding which five win the LEGO Fiats, let's look at all the entries we received!

There were a whopping 89 fabulous creations submitted by you lot, and we will reveal them over the course of three days, in the order we received them. Thank you all, for sharing these wonderful ideas.

Iron Builder: Bryce Dempsey's stud shooter techniques

The Iron Forge contestant from the Iron Builder challenge revealing their LEGO® techniques for you today is Bryce Dempsey (on Flickr, YouTube and Instagram), from California. Appropriately enough for a builder who creates replica guns from LEGO pieces, last week in Round 3 the seed part was part 15391, the Minifigure, Weapon Gun, Mini Blaster / Shooter. 

My favorite of my own builds for Round 3 using stud shooters as the seed part was the soda machine. The build featured 11 stud shooters in total, with many unique uses.

Iron Builder: Stud Shooter LEGO® building techniques

We've been asking the Forge competitors from Iron Builder to highlight the techniques they've used each week with the seed parts. In Round 3 last week the element they all had to use was Design ID 15391, known as the "Minifigure, Weapon Gun, Mini Blaster / Shooter" on BrickLink, "Mini Shooter With Ø3.2 Shaft" on Brickset and "Weapon Gun / Blaster / Shooter Mini" on Rebrickable. Since being introduced in 2014 it has appeared in six colours. Given many would consider this a "specialised element that can only be used for one thing", it was a great choice of seed part by the Iron Builder admin!

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Miro78: I found an interesting 'non-connection' with the stud shooters during my Round 3 builds, in the build Zorro where I included some furniture. 

Iron Builder: Thomas Jenkins' stud shooter techniques

We have another Iron Forge contestant from the Iron Builder challenge revealing their LEGO® techniques for you today: Thomas Jenkins (on Flickr and Instagram), a Welshman living in Japan who has been building with LEGO for over 20 years. Last week in Round 3 the seed part was part 15391, the Minifigure, Weapon Gun, Mini Blaster / Shooter. 

On my first assessment of the Stud Shooter piece, there were two ways to use it in a model: take advantage of the bar that sticks out at an angle from the barrel of the shooter, or utilize the gaps and recesses that are usually used to house the accompanying trigger element.

Techniques using the angled bar of LEGO Mini Shooter With Ø3.2 Shaft, Design ID 15391

The angle of the bar meant that when used in conjunction with more shooters, it was quite easy to reproduce something akin to a spider’s leg. 

The shooters are connected quite simply with a 1x1 round plate with hole. The spanner seed part from the previous round also found its way into this model!

Iron Builder: Cab's White Diamond techniques

We have another Iron Forge contestant from the Iron Builder challenge revealing LEGO® techniques for you today. Cab (on Flickr) hails from Germany but lives in California, and turned eighteen recently... "so I don't even know whether to call myself a TFOL or an AFOL". We don't think it matters really, so long as your techniques are awesome!

Hello everyone, Cab here! I was lucky enough to be among the final 20 contestants in this year’s instalment of The Forge. Now, while the final four compete for the prized Iron Builder slot, I thought I would share some techniques and tricks from my main entry in Round 2, a bust of the character White Diamond from the show Steven Universe. 

Adept builders will probably be familiar with many or all of these techniques, but I hope I can contribute to a few builders’ technical arsenals. 

Iron Builder: Jaap Bijl's hummingbird techniques

One of the contestants in Iron Builders preliminary rounds, The Iron Forge, is Jaap Bijl (jaapxaap, found on Flickr and Instagram) from the Netherlands and he is a member of Lowlug and Innovalug. He took part in our 2019 Parts Festival and has now progressed from the Top 20 to the Top 8 in the Forge. We asked him to explain a couple of the techniques involved in one of his Forge builds from last week.

Hey everyone, it’s Jaap here! I’ve been participating into the Iron Forge contest, and made it to the final 20. In that round we had to build using the hammer and/or the wrench minifig accessory pieces. At some point when I was playing around with the wrench piece I found a wrench combination that looked a lot like a bird’s beak to me. So there I started building this hummingbird.

(Yes, for those New Elementary readers who remember it, I also used those big yellow stars from the 2019 parts festival in the flowers!)