(how to make a lego wood cylinder by 2muchcaffeine)

If you’re making Lego custom minifigs, you’ll probably be wanting to make vignettes of these custom minifigs as well, and this is something customminifig.co.uk will be considering covering soon. In the mean time heres a useful tip to make cylinders from a Lego rail and several smooth plates. Very simple but looks great, and could be altered for all sorts of things, such as the lining on a dock by the ships.

Building custom minifigs isn’t difficult however you need to do a little planning before hand especially if its a big project and you want to get quality results. True, you can customize a minifig with a felt tip pen, but if you’re like me and a bit of a perfectionist you’ll probably want to get really high quality professional results, and that  will cost you a bit of money and take a bit of time, hence you’ll need to do some planning to make sure you mininize any mistakes.

Step 1

The first thing to do when starting a custom minifig project is to decide what you want, whats your custom minifig idea? you want spend a little time to basically try and describe what you want to acheive, there are several different styles of minifig customization, usually determined by the ‘time period’, eg modern, western, town, military, mech, and so forth, each kind of minifig customization has a different style and a method of customization so its worth considering which your custom minifig will fall into.

Step 2

Design, just because its a custom minifig doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing a few sketches over, its often worth just getting the initial concept down on papar get a feel for the colours you’re going to use, if you’re going to make custom decals to go on the minifig you’ll want to draw those out as well, if you have some building tools (there are several programs on the web which are free) you may want to get those out so you’ve got a clear plan of action and know exactly how your custom minifigs are going to look before you’ve spent your well earnt cash.

Step 3

Finding the right parts and identifying what you need to get/do, this is probably the most important part of making a custom minifig. This is where you need trawl the web to find the parts to make your custom minifig, you might find a minifig body that means you don’t need to create a custom minifig decal, or you might find that you’ll need to build a custom part of some sort, it’ll also give you a chance to refine your custom minifig design. In terms of where to look for custom minifig parts, check out our custom minifig store guide for the best retailers of custom minifig parts. When looking for custom minifig parts make sure you shop around for a good price and make sure you know what you are looking for before commiting to getting anything custom made for your custom minifig, often you might be able to get away with a standard minifig torse, rather than shelling out on a custom minifig decal.

Step 4

The Build, this is obviously very important to how your custom minifig will look, as such you need to take your time putting together your custom minifig, make sure you get it right and minimize mistakes, work in an area with good ventilation and light and make sure you keep your area tidy, only work on one part at a time, many minifig customizers tend to have a bits box where they keep left over parts from other custom minifig projects, you can use these to help with your build and naturally if you have any left over custom minifig bits just stick them in your bits box. It’s often worth taking a few photos of your custom minifig as a work in progress as this helps others see how you put the custom minifig together and can offer plent of feed back, this is particularly useful if the custom minifig you’re working on is a bit of a master piece.

Step 5

Finishing touches, if you’re anything like me you won’t stop working on a minifig even when its done, but essentially this stage is where you finsh op, work on all the details and check your custom minifig, then make sure you take photos and stick them up all over the web for other custom minifig fans to comment, this feed back from other minifig fans can be very useful for your next project but do take it with a pinch of salt.

Lego Minifigs are made of 6 parts, the head, arms, hands, torso, hips and legs, allowing for several points of movement, the head, arms, hands and feet all move. The Arms and legs are further divided into right and left sides.

Since the inception of Lego Minifigs, there have been some further variations to this basic Lego minifig design. Most notably in the legs and hips, you can find variations with springs in the feet (from the basket ball series) and ones with magnets (from the movie series). Additionally women with skirts were commonly illustrated in mini fig for by using a 3x1x4 vertical column with an angled side. Additionally a pair of squat legs was designed for shorter Lego minifigs such as yoda, these however don’t allow for any leg movement at all.

Accessories, decals and head gear are also additional elements which make up the standard Lego minifig. Accessories can take the form of objects that fit into the mini figs hand, as well as items that sit on the head plug (such as back packs or capes), or fabric items such as gun holsters and robes. decals are the design element and one of the key ways to distinguish the sex of the lego minifig, typically decals are found on the front and back of the torso, this along with the decals that go on the face  form the basic ways in which a Lego minifigs personality and uniqueness come out. within Custom mini fig circles there have even been decals that go on the hands and arms that have been created.

In addition to these foundations Lego have also produced additional role specific Lego elements such as the ghost and skeleton as well as various other alien elements, and whilst these can be considered minifigs in the broadest sense their use within mini fig customization, at least for the moment seems limited.

Essentially by using these elements you can create totally customized minifigs that reflect a whole range of personalities. Below is a montage of some great examples of customized minifigs.