Now this is the way to store minifigs, and whilst there are no custom minifigs here, you have to admit this is one hell of a MOC, its immense, just look at the sofa in the background! and this MOC can store well over 100 minifigs, as well as 4 transports, including the MTT Lego set and all the minifigs that come with that! This is literally an army of minifigs in a MOC the size of a house pet! Impressive.
I really like the custom made decal used on this minifig, I’m guessing the original decal was left in place and the custom one overlayed on top, it gives this minifig a more unique appreance and adds so action to the otherwise clean and prestine clone trooper.
The star wars lego series was one of the most popular Lego ranges, and very widely supported by the cult of starwars fans, who, as it so happens are also Lego fans, the Lego Star wars range is also one of the best for minifigs, with a whole catalogue of easily customizable and interesting minifigs being released as a result of the 6 films, 1 animation and countless comics, as a result making starwars custom minifigs is almost a seperate catagory, and as this image of a custom made minifig head, made out of various Lego parts, proves, there’s no shortage of talent when it comes to making yet more unique minifigs on the star wars theme.
(custom star wars scout clone trooper Lego minifig by Fine Clonier)
this custom minifig has some really impressive decals from Fine Clonier on it, it seems that one of the largest niche’s in minifig customization is within starwars lego minifigs, a good move from Lego there! more impressively virtually all the custom starwars minifigs I’ve seen are finished to a really high standard and this custom Lego storm trooper scout minifig is no exception, the only gripe I have is that the decal might be a bit too detailed, meaning that it may not be as good looking from afar.
Whilst for most of use who make custom minifigs the dream would be either Lego actually make military collections, or we can get our hands on some durable minifigs with custom decals, the reality is getting decent military themed minifigs is quite difficult, you need to really plan out what you want to acheive, since the Indiana Jones collection does have some Lego minifigs with a Military theme, and StarWars has a whole range of storm troopers, its not so difficult for sci-fi or WWII custom minifig makers. But if you’re hopeing to make something modern, get ready to do some serious hunting.
so Lets take a look a the themes that work for military vignettes:
You’ll find that in order to build up a large army of minifigs, you’ll either need to buy loads of sets of Lego, leaving you with plenty of potentially useless spare parts and costing you an arm and a leg, or, you’ll need to search on the second hand Lego community to find individual parts, in this instance you’ll need to potentially buy the minifig in seperate parts, ie legs seperate from arms, torso seperate from head etc, this can add to the cost, but you’ll be able to get exactly what you need.
In other instances you might have designed a custom decal for your Lego minifigs, your best bet here is to source the lego minifig whos plastic is as close to the base colour you want, then, using brasso remove the existing decal and apply your own one instead, this might take longer and costa bit, but the results are supurb.
This is an incredible MOC vignette filled with Star wars minifigs, custom made from scratch, i simply couldn’t resist showing you as the detail is amazing, there’s a canteen, toliets, bunk beds, an armory, and a multitude of other fantastic custom features for the minifigs contained within. You can see more of this amazing custom vignette and its minifigs here.
Yes, yes, I know this is the second vignette I’ve written about on custom minifig, but lets be clear these Lego vingettes are pretty darn impressive, take this Lego Star Wars Custom Minifig Planet Hoth Vignette by Brick plumber, talk about dedication and artistic prowess. It’s 5 feet by 10 feet large, and has over 60,000 Lego pieces, took 4 years to make and recently won a star wars building challenge and got featured in the Lego magazine. Pretty impressive.
Despite the scale the details within the vignette are equally impressive, there are 50 real lights, and some remote controlled mechanism, that allows that AT-ATs to deploy Lego minifig storm troopers.
As you can see there is no shorteage on minifig size details, not least there are foot prints in the snow, several ‘mini vignettes’ in parts of the vignette, such as the one above, the detail on this Lego Star Wars Custom Minifig Planet Hoth Vignette is so hight that there’s even two types of snow, the un ground up powder (smooth), versus the well trampled rough snow! Check out the rest of this Lego Star Wars Custom Minifig Planet Hoth Vignette
2008 marks 30 years of Minifig fun, it was in August 1978 that Lego produced the first Lego Minifig, and no surprise to the fans of the MiniFig, Minifig customization happened not long after that. The Lego MiniFigs we are referring to here are the minifigs that have movable arms and legs in 1975 the precursor to the Minifig was launched, it was a simplistic variant with no arms and looked similar to an mannequin.
Since the first Lego minifig was created by Jens Nygaard Knudsen a Lego employee since 1968 who came up with the minifigs after over 50 prototypes the very first mini figure, a police man was created, the Lego Police man mini figure is still one of the most popular MiniFigs created by Lego, with over 41 versions appearing in over 104 different Lego sets in the last 30 years, several variations on the basic Lego minifig have developed over the years, covering a wide variety of popular themes. Some of the most ground breaking were the creation of Lego Ghosts, Lego women, Lego characters based on films, Race illustrating minifigs, and anime influence minifigs. To date there are over 4,000 official unique designs of minifigs all based around the 1979 US patented design, as Lego Mini Figs are design with 7 different interchangeable elements it’s estimated that there are over 8 Quadrillion combination’s.
Through this massive success of the Lego mini fig, which literally turned around the company’s prospects, Lego has since launch collectable mini figs, the most notable being 10,000 Lego mini fig versions of C3PO cast in 14K gold, to mark the Star Wars 30th anniversary in 2007, amazingly these are billed to be worth over USD$200 each!
The popularity of the Lego minifig has meant that the minifig population has grown to around 4 billion! Thats 3 times the population of China, good thing they don’t eat! There are literally enough minifigs to surround the world over 4 times, and the population is growing with 4 minifigs being sold every second around the world, a growth rate of over 122 million a year.
In 1989 the Pirates series show wooden legs and hand hooks as well as the first distinguishable facial characteristics marking a shift and keener commitment to making Lego minifigs more unique. Between 1989 and 1997 female characters as well as role specific minifigs (such as the ghost) were created, In 1997 the first racial minority was produced by Lego – the Indians for the western series, this change was marked by the costumes and face prints, 1999 showed the success and endorsement by the Star Wars empire which saw the launch of one of the most successful lines of Lego created. The Significance of this for the Lego minifig was in the creation of minifigs that represented actual characters this lead to innovations in minifig design that cumulated in 2003 with the creation of real people depicted as Lego mini figs, notably NBA legos based on real life basketball players including Kobe Bryant. As a result of the popularity of Film based lego such as Star Wars, Batman and Spider Man, many actors have also be ‘minifiged’, however only two have been enshrined in minifig-dom twice – Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones & Han Solo) and Alfred Molina (Satiop & Doc Octopus), additionally Manga saw a raise in popularity which resulted in rubberized hair created for minifigs and more animated mang-esq expressions.
In 2008, just in time for the 30 year anniversary of the Lego minifig, a single custom minifig redefined the world perception of Lego and exposed the customization of Lego as a legitimate and publicly recognized part of the Lego minifig’s history, the controversy that revolved around this particular Minifig was two fold, first it was the first individual mini fig to hit international new press and second it was a minifig with recognizable weapons, including an AK47 produced by Brick Arms, a small company that formed part of the minifig customization community. Lego were quick to point out its Politically correct stance and distance itself from the Mr White Bandit creation, however the effect of this press was a massive increase in mini fig customization and ultimately the creation os Customminifig.co.uk.
