If you are one of the few people interested in what I do whether on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, then you will be aware of my liking of lego mini figures. Or I'd hope so with the number of photos I share on those social networks. It may have also rared it's ugly head on here as well in the odd photo or two on one or two of the posts.

I'm not one of those big lego fanatic collectors. I just buy figures I like, or think I can use to illustrate a blog post. So we are looking at Lord of the Rings, Superheroes, and Star Wars stuff really. To be honest I only have a small handful of figures. Although I do have certain figures to illustrate certain board games, such as the scientists, doctor etc for Pandemic.

However since Christmas I've come up with a little project involving the lego mini figures. The idea is to get or create mini figures that represents who I am and my interests. A couple were easy, such as the gamer, the computer programmer, the mountaineer, because they already existed as official mini figures. I had to create a blogger. Which I did by buying the individual parts to put together a mini figure to represent me as a blogger (see below).

Next up is to create the following mini figures for this project, a hacktivist, a backpacker, and a lecturer. Now I know they do a backpacker in a lego set that you can buy, and there is also a teacher mini figure. However I'm going to create my own version of these. So I've been trawling the custom lego figure parts sites looking for appropriate bits to make these figures.

Once that stage of the project is complete it has a second stage. I want to put together some custom lego sets to photograph the figures on. So I'm looking to create a blogging desk/workstation, a tabletop gaming table, a wild camping camp site and maybe a classroom!

Here are a couple of the photos I've shared on other social media outlets. This first one is titled “Father and son”.

This next one is using the new Heath Ledger figure I've just got.

I've also found a couple of books about making your own custom mini figures, so payday they will be on their way to me. I'm sure stuff I learn from this will feed into gaming too, and painting miniatures.

In the run up to Christmas there was a teacher thing on Twitter that had teachers on holiday taking photos of lego mini figures doing Christmassy stuff. I forget the blog name now but they had a hashtag #legoholidaychallenge (Here is the blog post I was talking about click here) . It's not something I took part in. But it's something I've been doing on and off since then. The nice thing is I can use the appropriate mini figure of me in different situations.

Now as I've already said I putting together custom figures to represent me. And this idea came from the organisers of Game Camp (which I went to last year), where they had on a previous Game Camp used minifigs as a game/getting to know you activity. Where attendees were given a mini figure and had to swap with others to get the parts to make a mini figure of themselves. One day as an induction exercise I'd like to do this with my students. But in the meantime how cool would it be if these teachers did a similar thing and created minifigs of themselves and used them in the photos?

So maybe not the most exciting “hobby” but certainly a light hearted fun one.

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app