Rogue Olympics is an 8 week long contest held by Rogue Bricks every year in which each round lasts 1 week and builders are allowed a maximum of 101 parts for there creation. Unfortunately for me, I was only able to make entries for 6 weeks. In this blog I will add a bit of commentary about each, though with how small each one is it won’t be full length like usual.
Week 1: “Fragile”
For the week one theme “fragile”, I hadn’t actually planned on participating. That said I had some spare time on my hands and wanted to throw together something quick. The first thing that came to mind for me was the house from the 3 little pigs and the big bad wolf story. I couldn’t think of a way to execute on that however, so I pivoted to a sandcastle. The idea of a building on shaky foundation appealed to the theme for me, and I figured micro-scale was a good move for the 101 part limit. Some of my favorite part usages from this round were the dumplings for towers (which wouldn’t be the last time I used the part during the contest) and the dark azure marbled dragon wings for the waves crashing in the foreground. Overall not a very complicated build, but certainly a fragile one since it kept falling over while I was photographing it.
Week 2: “Blue”
For week 2, I was on the road traveling to see my friend Brickspiration over spring break! Fortunately for me, this meant I had access to his very funky parts collection which was wildly different to my own. As a quick note, I almost built sonic for this round just to respect the local audience I was visiting, but in the end I went my style with another creature. The highlight for me this round was getting to use all of Brickspiration’s fun dinosaur and big fig parts. Personally, these big animal and minifigures aren’t really something I own in my collection, so I took the opportunity to make the funniest terrain I could think of.
There actually were some parts that were usable enough to the point where I would consider buying them, including Rex’s tail and the T-Rex’s head. The last thing I got to mess around with was some natural photography. I’m not great with a camera so no light box was a struggle for me, but I had surprising success in the garden this round. The lighting was actually really easy and the only thing I had a hard time with was finding an area without too cluttered, or too empty, of a background. In the end I was pretty stoked with the shot I got. 10/10 round, thank you to the goat!
Week 3: “From Above”
Technically I didn’t actually miss this round my entry just sucked. I completely blanked the deadline was not in my timezone, so forgot to polish off my entry before getting it in. I thought I was being clever with this one, but it would’ve looked cooler in person with flex tube and Modulex letters spelling “Think. Build. Repeat.” as originally intended.
Week 4: “Draft”
I missed this week, life happens! Nathan’s entry was awesome though check out his commentary here!
Week 5: “Green”
With the atrocities of weeks 3 and 4 in the books, I knew I had to go hard on week 5. In light of that, I got this entry done in the first 2 days of the round. My build for this round was originally meant to be Rango, but after struggling so much, I soft pivoted to an original character. In the end, this ended up being one of my favorite tiny builds ever! I feel like I was able to pack the perfect details into this build while still having plenty of parts to spare. Furthermore, every time I ran into an issue, it seemed to just solve itself. For example, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to build Rango’s eyes. So, when designing my own character, I expected this to be a struggle to. That said, this eyeball packed the exact look I was aiming for. The slight squint really gave it the western vibe I was hoping for and the problem was solved immediately! Similarly, when struggling with the mouth I experimented with many options, before realizing I could just skip it while even adding an awesomely fitting mustache. True Lego color enthusiasts will notice this was an earth orange croissant, which weirdly was the most perfect fit. I was able to top the voting this week which was a nice concellation for my poor performance the week prior. This is also one of the only surviving builds from the contest, which goes to show how much I loved it! I took two nice photos which I had a tough time deciding between, so I will include both below for you to pick!
Week 6: “Sparks”
This round was a struggggglleeeee. I was super sick this week which gave me plenty of time to build but absolutely no motivation to do so. The very first part of this build I came up with ended up being the only part I liked, but wow do these two energy effects look sick when layered! I feel like I had a lot of good ideas this round, especially with the color scheme, but man it never came together. The scale of the build was also certainly too big for the 101 part limit, and I just didn’t have the big parts to get the job done. In the end even though I went through many iterations and designs, I still wasn’t happy with the one I had to ultimately settle on.
Week 7: “Detached”
In my opinion this was my most underrated build of the contest. I honestly thought I nailed it with a pretty abstract interpretation of what is certainly a very tough theme. The build didn’t place or get a great reception, but bar the pose of the character I was pretty proud of the build. The first thing I had build was the suit and it came together really cleanly. The return of the dumplings this time for balled fists was nice in my opinion and the technic panels plus diamonds formed a good sharp suit texture. I even snuck a white hexagon add on under for good shirt layering. The legs were inspired by the incredible Josephine Monterosso on flickr which I thought drove home the animatronic motif. With the extra parts I had, I decided to throw in the hexagon shields to enhance the world building. I continued this by shooting on a blue background representing the sky that the cloud was appearing in.
I’m kind of glazing my own build a lot with this write up, but I definitely was disappointed with the reception for what was one of my favorite builds. That said there is always a lesson to be learned, and I think the takeaway here was a need to focus on my character posing. Although it may fit for this character, the soulless standstill pose really sucks the life out of the build. I think a more dynamic and interesting pose would’ve gone a long way towards making this a better build! Nonetheless I was happy with my production for the round!
Week 8: “Transparent”
I kind of knew I wasn’t going to win anything at this point, so I figured I would just subject everyone else to horrors beyond comprehension. Just kidding, I actually did go through quite the creative process on this one, starting at Bob’s Tropical Fish! When visiting, I saw some sick looking fish with entirely see through bodies which served as my inspiration for the round. To me this was super cool and I wanted to try and replicate them in Lego. That said my transparent part selection, like many other people I’m sure, is very limited. After a couple hours of fiddling, I couldn’t nail down a look for a fish. During my experiments however I had gotten out my Krika parts bag to mess with. Not only are they somewhat transparent, but they have this distinct fleshy/boney look. I decided to use these as a basis for another character build, with the Krika head as the main torso/spine. For the internals, I thought it would be funky to stuff some food where the stomach would be in order to sell that transparent look. After putting a chicken and a carrot in, I had my inspiration for the name of the build. I decided to add a medal around the neck to sell the name at the end as well. Lastly for the head of the build I got great use from the pagoda tiles in trans-clear from the kingfisher set! The spiky hair and red bar eyeballs really ended up looking strikingly like Morty, but I figured that was alright for such a weird build. I thought this build was really cool in the end and certainly one of the more unique things I’ve made! Along with The Sheriff, it was the only other build to survive the contest.
Conclusion
Although I only had a few good weeks in this contest, it greatly helped my building ability. I noticed the biggest improvement in my conceptual creativity throughout, with my last few weeks really going off the rails. Even if it hurt me on voting, I thought this was great as an opportunity to explore character design and see what works and what doesn’t. Furthermore as I discussed earlier, I learned a valuable lesson about posing my builds. Dynamic builds may be harder to make, but they really emphasize the life a build could have. I was a little burnt out by the end of this contest even without entering every week so I’m not sure if I will enter again, but I am happy with what I learned!
Shout out to Nathan who helped me improve throughout this contest, he truly has mastered the 101 element cap, you can read about all his builds for this years contest as well as last years in the respective hyperlinks!
You can check out my flickr album for all the builds and their names (except the grid) here!