Custom Minifigures

It is Saturday evening as I sit here writing this.  By Monday my brain will probably be far too frazzled from overwork and undersleep to come up with a coherent post.  So many MOCs to complete, so few days before the convention…

The reason that I’m taking some time to blog now is because my hands are starting to cramp up.  You see, I’ve been slowly turning plain black torsos into Green Lantern uniform tops for about 45 minutes now, and I’m starting to lose the ability to move my left thumb.  So I’m alternating.  A little time at the keyboard, followed by a little time snapping bricks together, and maybe my hand will work well enough to start in on the minifigs again. 

“My Kingdom for Some Customization Skills”

It seems like most of the minifigures I really, really want simply don’t exist.  (I’m sure those of you who have been reading my Thursday posts are already well aware of this.) 

But to create the kind of figures I want requires talent.  (And expensive equipment, but considering that I could always win the lottery or something, ‘talent’ seems the more far-fetched of the two.)  Back in October at BrickCon, I bought a pair of books on Minifigure Customization, but have yet to find the time to give them more than just a cursory glance-through.  And simply thumbing through them didn’t magically give me customizing skills.  (Dagnabit!)

I started to read about how to use waterslide decals, but gave that up once I felt my eyes starting to roll back in my head. 

The Original Custom

The current Green-Lanternization of these minifigs isn’t actually my first foray into customizing.  I actually invented minifigure customization, way back in the day. 

Okay, that’s maybe not quite true on a straight timeline.  Probably far more accurate to say that I independently discovered minifigure customization.  Hadn’t heard about it, didn’t know people did it, and one day thought, “Hey, maybe I could make a Spider-Man minifig …”

At some point in the mid-90s, I purchased a used LEGO set from Goodwill.  A battered LEGO fire truck set box, sealed shut with packing tape.  I asked an employee if she knew whether or not the set was complete, and she answered, “Probably?”  Yes, that’s right:  ‘Probably’ with a question mark.  I bought it anyway.  (It was cheap.) 

I opened it up when I got home and dumped it out onto my table.  About half the contents of the box were plastic building bricks.  (Mostly LEGO brand, but with quite a few Mega-Bloks and similar knock-offs mixed in.)  The rest of the box was taken up by golf tees and plastic army men.  It contained two and a half minifigs (none of which were firemen).  The torso and head of the half-minifig was in decent shape.  One of the others was cracked, and the remaining figure was dirty.  Like, caked-on grime.  Yeesh!

I put everything back in the box and exiled it the back of my the closet. 

And then in 1997, I really wanted a Spider-Man minifigure.  (LEGO would release actual Spider-Man minifigs in 2003, but at the time I had no way of knowing that.) 

I pulled out the Goodwill LEGO box, and fished out the filthy figure.  “You,” I told it, “Are going to be Spider-Man.”  I scrubbed it clean, sanded it a little, and then coated it in gray spray primer. 

(Important to note:  this story takes place before the onset of arthritis, seizures, and the tendency for my hands to shake whenever I attempt detail work.) 

Then I got out the acrylic paint and some brushes, and proceeded to paint it up in Spider-Man colors.  I knew that attempting the weblines on the costume would be a lost cause, as I didn’t have a brush that fine or painting skills that developed.  But I was quite proud of the finished product. 

 

Even though I impressed myself with that end result, for some reason, that’s where my LEGO minifigure customization stopped.  I did the one figure, then quit. 

Custom Torsos

Last month, I sent my PhotoShop guy some reference images and a blank minifig template.  He sent back some custom minifigure torso designs based upon my specifications.  And while those wonderful designs he slaved over are next on my customization list, they aren’t going to happen in time for Bricks Cascade. 

My PhotoShop guy didn’t make it all the way through the list, and so I had no designed-for-me Green Lantern images.  So:  I typed “Green Lantern torso decals” into Google Images, and just used what I found there. 

Resized the image, slapped it into a word processor document, copied and pasted about forty times, then took my flash drive down to my local Postal Connections, and had them print the file out onto a sheet of address labels. 

Then I started cutting out torso stickers, and applying them to the cadre of headless, handless black minifigures that have come to me via Bricklink over the past month and a half. 

These figures started out looking like this…

 

…and ended up looking like this.   Snazzy, no? 

 

They aren’t by any means perfect, but with less than a week to go before the convention, I’ve given up on ‘perfection’ for this go-round. 

The End Result?

I was planning – after finishing the customizations – to show you the end result of all this.  My 30 (give-or-take) members of the Green Lantern Corps, complete with heads and hands.  But then it occurred to me… if I show you my Green Lanterns now, whatever will you have to look at on Friday?