Mind that Banana contest: The winners

With the new LEGO® Fortnite Odyssey social roleplay experience Brick Life launching today, 12 December 2024, now's the perfect moment to announce the winners of our Mind that Banana contest and find out which original creations won the prizes of LEGO Fortnite sets! 

We asked readers to create non-banana MOCs using LEGO bananas. With 102 entries to judge, finding the pick of the bunch was no easy task.

Contest entry gallery: Mind that Banana

Our building contest – where you had to use a LEGO® banana, but were not allowed to make a banana – has finally split. Entries closed earlier today, and now it is up to our three judges to pick the most apeeling creations. In the meantime, you can enjoy all 103 entries yourself, thanks to all the wonderful participants who joined in and showed off their creative skills!

After-Party Fest: Nathan Don's MOCs

Today we welcome guest Nathan Don (woomy_world), who is our final builder in After-Party Fest, our LEGO® building challenge using seed parts of interesting moulds released by LEGO over the last 12 months. Nathan's stunning work was selected for display until September 2025 at the prestigious LEGO House Masterpiece Gallery in Denmark, where Tim and Jonas met him at the time of installation. He then attended our Skaerbaek Fan Weekend building workshop, where these seed parts came from, and we sent him home to the US with a baggie to experiment with further!

After-Party Fest: Caz Mockett's MOCs

When my allocation of the eclectic mix of  LEGO® elements from the New Elementary Skærbæk Fan Weekend workshop arrived through my letterbox, I was immediately inspired by some of the seed parts, and perplexed by others. But I do love a parts fest, so I started by noodling around with a couple of tablescraps, which is usually a good way to get the creative juices flowing. Let's see what happened.

After-Party Fest: Kev Levell's MOCs

One of my favourite LEGO® activities is a good old New Elementary parts festival. I love taking part, for a number of reasons. A bundle of lovely new parts arrive, supplied in the kind of quantities that would be prohibitively expensive for me to acquire in any of the normal ways. There are elements I perhaps might not gravitate to buying, and that's a nice challenge to face. There's a shared experience with fellow builders in the creation of MOCs that generally surprise and delight, both from my own build table and those of my co-contributors. They have become rarer in recent years and that too makes them a sweet experience. In short, even as a regular contributor to New Elementary, it's a privilege and an honour to be included.

2024 Skærbæk workshop and After-Party Fest: introducing the elements

New Elementary ran a building workshop at Skærbæk Fan Weekend in September 2024. During the event, attendees were tasked with making something using 10 elements released in the last 12 months as seed parts; we will show you some of the results in due course, but first up, it's our turn! We rounded up some of the reclaimed seed parts from the workshop to run one of our "parts festivals", and dispatched them to a couple of our regular contributors: Kev Levell and Caz Mockett, and one of the workshop attendees, Nathan Don as a guest builder.

So, welcome to After-PartyFest! For our first instalment, Tom Loftus introduces all 10 elements and to take a closer look at those that have escaped New Elementary's analytical eye so far. 

Contest: Mind that Banana

CONTEST NOW CLOSED
View the entries

In celebration of the awesome elements in the Peely Bone set, we are running a building contest with 7 great LEGO® Fortnite prizes!

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