A Pirate Scene

The 5 year old has lately taken an interest in pirate figures when playing with Lego. That seemed to be the primary driving force in the scenario she created that is documented below.

First, a mermaid holding an umbrella had to make an appearance, along with an alligator.

I'm not really sure the reason for the soldier, although I suspect she doesn't differentiate between him and the pirates since he came with some of them. You may notice in the above picture at the far right and in the following the peg-legged pirate is at the end of the line of the main pirate group. That is because he has a peg leg, so he runs slower. Let's now take a look at what they are running towards.

Err, apparently they are headed to fight a group of Storm Troopers and Mandalorians. Wait, I don't think those guys are normally on the same side...

 

I also think that one of the Troopers is holding a katana. Frankly, I am finding this all a bit confusing. As for the bystander...

I'm at a loss to explain any further.

Samurai At Rest

The collectible minifigures have been a great source of inspiration by providing scenes for them to live in. I made a quick attempt one night to show the samurai from series 3 outside of his battle armor.

I thought it worked o.k., although my choice of colors for the table and weapon/armor racks could have been a lot better. What was really fun for me though was this kid built table for her snowboarder to relax at.

I'm sure those goblets are full of water...

Under the Helmet

In the prequel trilogy we found out that all of those clone troopers from Kamino were from the genetic material of none other than Jango Fett.

Like always, they decided it would be better to swap out the heads.

I find the decision to use a female head pretty fun. What really warms my heart though, is that the elder child expressed her preference for yellow Lego heads over the fleshies that the newer licensed sets come with.

Ready to Move Out

The empire is really getting busy and pulling old troopers out of retirement for their upcoming battle. After some retraining they all seem to be ready for duty. Well, almost...

CMF Series 4

Reports starting hitting late last week that Lego Collectible Minifigures Series 4 were hitting the west coast in Fred Meyer's. One of which happens to be pretty close to our house, so when the kids woke up Saturday morning they found this sitting on the kitchen table.

Normally new sets get tucked away in the closet until a rainy afternoon, but in this case I wanted to confirm we actually had all 16 so I knew whether to watch for any misses or not. The reason I was confirming this is the packages are unlabeled, so I spent time in the store feeling packages late Friday night to try and confirm the contents. I'm guessing I wasn't the first person to do that during the day, as the store clerks trying to restock the shelves only looked at me like I was a bit crazy, not completely off my rocker.

Luckily after 15 minutes of opening bags and assembling, we had the target of all 16, plus a few doubles that the kids were looking forward to playing with. This is one of the easiest ways to stock up on girl figures, which they particularly seem to enjoy playing with.

The kimono girl was probably their favorite, due to her pretty flower dress. It is a pretty cool print, and the fan is a first as far as I know. The kids have good taste.

And the whole crew arranged with giant cups and boxes looming in the background. All around Series 4 is a pretty good arrangement of figures that even if you were to pick randomly would be unlikely to let you down.

Lightbox Round 1

For taking pictures of small objects, a lightbox seemed like it could be useful, and it seemed like a pretty simple project to take a stab at. The kids actually seemed pretty excited about it as well, even though they had no idea what it was before hand. Apparently the name sounds pretty exciting. The first step was to find a box. Thanks to ordering Lego sets on Amazon, that was pretty easy to find.

The one item we needed to buy was a piece of poster board for the interior. That was placed inside it as a continuous curve. After that we placed a plain white sheet around it and put a light overhead. In retrospect a thinner piece of fabric and a brighter light would have worked better, but this worked as a reasonable proof of concept.

The obvious next step was to take some test shots. The first subject chosen by the kids was this hula girl.

This shot of an AT-AT was my favorite of the shoot.

This setup also looked kind of cool when I pulled back a bit. Don't look if you don't want the magic destroyed. But it's not that magical, so I'd go ahead and look.

We used a small enough box that not everything we tried to take shots of really fit, but they were still fun to experiment with.

Maybe next time we'll get a bigger box.

Mermaid

The 5 year old came up with this mermaid design all by herself.