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Hi! I’m Renée from McCandless (yup, barely 10 minutes to the Lego store!) Lego has been sneaking up on me the last couple of years, from finding my first Lego Store in King of Prussia Mall six years ago to taking the Mindfulness with Lego Bricks class last month from CCAC. Taking the class made buying myself a set justifiable (Classic 11013 with transparent bricks – beautiful!), and so it has begun. I like building small MOCs, sorting bricks and photographing LEGO. Oh, and I’ve played most the Xbox LEGO games with my daughter.
Welcome aboard! *Every* kind of LEGO fan is welcome here, even those who just like things like sorting. There is someone who can help you with any little thing, if you learn who does what. Ask around!
I like small MOCs, and I’ve shifted to that for a while now. Great to build for many reasons. Lower design stress. Lower part count. Less expensive! Easier to build a diorama or larger display piece by piece through related small MOCs. Better focus on individual part usage. Progress is faster per build. And that little burst of satisfaction comes a little more often.
As for transparent parts, I like seeing their usage to depict water, whitecaps in waves and waterfalls, stained glass windows, lava, ice, force fields, energy beams, fountains… I’ve seen it used to depict a spaceship coming out of cloaking, and one of our builders did a whole virtual reality diorama using nothing but trans-light blue elements.
Transparent parts are very useful. For me, the rich cobalt like blue in trans-dark blue is one of my favorite LEGO colors. And trans-bright green fluoresces brightly under UV light.
Just don’t sleeve anything transparent through other parts. Haha. This mostly applies to bars through holes. If you do that, you won’t be able to get the transparent part out again very often.
I’ll pass this tip on: transparent parts are made from a different material that has MUCH higher clutch power. I even use this to my advantage when connecting parts of a build by a low number of studs. Putting transparent parts there helps at the stress point.
Anyway, welcome! Post anything LEGO that’s cool to you.
Hello, I am Kerri and I just joined. I also just took the Mindful Play with LEGO Bricks class and experienced joy like a child. I thought I would see what the LUG does. I haven’t done a lot of building but look forward to more in the future.
Well that’s pretty cool. Steel City LUG does a wide, wide range of things. We build displays for public events, but we also hold internal contests. Once COVID is over, we’ll start up a serious display schedule again.
We often find the best LEGO deals for bricks. We trade bricks. We help each other with ideas, building styles, and design problems. We share our builds and how we go about things. We talk about individual pieces and how they’re used.
We have builders in all kinds of specialties. We have City/Town builders. Trainheads. Spacers. @greg does Currier and Ives snowy dioramas, the ones you see on the classier Christmas cards. @timf builds large skyscrapers. @bengood921 does landscapes and plants, and also builds intentionally complex machines called Great Ball Contraptions. @randomdan likes Monorail and large industrial buildings and machines. We have multiple builders into Harry Potter and Castles. And it just scratches the surface of the breadth of what Steel City LUG builders have done.
It’s fun to see what our builders can do. One year we had someone build a Bumper Cars amusement ride by hiding motorized magnets under the build’s surface to move the bumper cars around. Heck, we even built a LEGO brick version of a board game one time for an adult art show. We built a diorama to help Warner Brothers promote the opening of The LEGO Movie. And another one for The LEGO Batman Movie.
We have builders that specialize in small builds too. We have serious builders. We have fun builders. Big. Small. Specialized. Abstract. Motorized. Old. Brand new.
We build sets. We make up new builds and sometimes brand new stories. We sort brick. We share techniques and tricks.
We do a LOT. Just… not all at the same time. So, anything you’re into, add it into the mix. Start your own thread! I bet you’ll find someone else in the LUG to talk to about something cool we’re doing.
Hi @legoleia51 and @kacierno! Welcome to the group! 🙂
Bonjour @greg, definitely looking forward to real-life LUG events! Seriously considering the Q2 challenge 🙂
@zaximillian, thanks for the insight into transparent bricks, I hadn’t yet noticed the clutch power difference and I will be mindful @knb112 @kacierno of that going forward!
@knb112 I was also going to mention that I was going to build something for your spring photos, but I can’t find the thread nowRenée:
One of the more advanced things I like about transparent parts, especially larger ones, is that I can see the tubes and structure inside, which adds to the detail of a mechanical or Spacey assembly, especially a smaller one. This is unique within those trans-light blue 6 x 1 curved slopes you have. That smaller detail is pretty neat.
I hadn’t yet noticed the clutch power difference and I will be mindful @knb112 @kacierno of that going forward!
The student has become the master! 😂
@knb112 I was also going to mention that I was going to build something for your spring photos, but I can’t find the thread nowThat would be awesome, thank you! Here’s the link to the thread: http://www.steelcitylug.com/forum/topic/spring-and-easter-pictures-open-now/
I hadn’t yet noticed the clutch power difference and I will be mindful @knb112 @kacierno of that going forward!
The student has become the master! 🙂
@knb112 I was also going to mention that I was going to build something for your spring photos, but I can’t find the thread nowThat’s awesome, thanks so much! Here’s a link to the thread: http://www.steelcitylug.com/forum/topic/spring-and-easter-pictures-open-now/
I hadn’t yet noticed the clutch power difference and I will be mindful @knb112 @kacierno of that going forward!
The student has become the master! 🙂
@knb112 I was also going to mention that I was going to build something for your spring photos, but I can’t find the thread now
That would be awesome, thank you! Here’s a link to the thread: http://www.steelcitylug.com/forum/topic/spring-and-easter-pictures-open-now/
experienced joy like a child
Welcome both of you! Glad you have rediscovered the Lego hobby. @kacierno, your statement here really encapsulates why I love Lego. It brings back to me the pure joy of creating and building. It allows me to unplug from the daily grind and just relax. I suspect it does that for many of us.
Hi Renee, I saw your dragonfly pic on the other thread, and followed it to Flickr. If you’re posting pics to Flickr, you should definitely join our group there, so you can submit your photos to the group as well:
(Edit – the website autofill is replacing the link with a photo of the most recent submission to the group photo pool, but if you click on it, it should take you to the Flickr group.)
(Second edit – This website is a mystery to me sometimes. The link I posted is for the Overview tab for the group, yet if I click in the message, it goes to the Photo tab.)
Thanks @bengood921 for the lead on the LUG’s flickr group, I’ve joined! I’ve only been on Flickr a couple of days so it’s really new to me 🙂
Yes, medium lavender. I’m a fan of all the purple bricks as well- LEGO didn’t have that color when I was a kid!
Another transparent bricks thing I do a lot: I try to match the transparent color to a solid color. This is so I can parallel the transparent elements to their similar solid color close by in a build. It’s really effective and ties the build together.
Other times, I’ll pay attention to the solid color contrast that the transparent color directly connects to. For example, trans-red connected to black is pretty low visibility and not effective, while trans-red on yellow pops much better. When TLG designed some of the Blacktron I sets, they made this mistake. Obviously, some transparent colors might look really dull or sickly atop certain solid colors I’ve found. Your mileage may vary, and it’s worth planning ahead on transparent color combinations and color sequences.
Since there are multiple trans-blue colors AND trans-purple, transitioning to purple/lavender/magenta parts in sequence might look pret-ty good…
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