Saturday, March 23, 2013

Custom Decorations for Minifigures

Hello Fans,

Thank you for visiting this blog. I know it has been a very long while since I last posted, but school has bogged me down. Thank you again for your patience and your understanding.

School has taken my time from building with LEGO, but it has not taken my time away from LEGO related activities. So today's post will be about designing your own decorations for your own bricks, minifigures, etc.

There are already companies who make decorations for you, but they cost money. I will show you how to do this by yourself.

I will guide you through the steps I took to achieve a nice decoration for a LEGO minifigure.

1. Scan a LEGO element.
If you have a scanner, use it to scan a side of a LEGO piece that you want to add a sticker onto.

2. Upload and Edit
Upload the scanned image into your computer. I will use Microsoft PowerPoint to make decorations. Please use any program that lets you import images and at the very least draw shapes, lines, etc. In this image, I wanted to make a custom tuxedo for my minifigure, and I used a blank torso as a guide to how big the image should be.


3. Begin Editing.
Use the tools provided in your program to edit or add to your sticker. In Microsoft PowerPoint, I used shapes and colors to make a suit. You can see the image that I scanned, and the shapes I made to make a suit.

4. Test fit
If your decoration has color on it, I recommend you first print it out gray scale just to make sure that the sticker fits. Once it fits, print it out in full color.

5. Cut and paste
Cut out the image to fit your brick, and stick it on with any adhesive. I just use tape so that I can easily remove the sticker if I needed to.

6. Done
After the sticker is pasted on, you are done and you can continue playing with your LEGO, or make more stickers.
You can see in this image, my minifigure has a white tuxedo on. The female minifigure's dress was also edited to five plates high instead of 6 plates high (2 bricks).

If there is anything you feel is missing from this tutorial, please comment. The comments I get are sent to my email, and I can check what you commented.

Thank you again for your patience.