Church of the Flying Spaghetti
Monster
Construction Photos
While I was waiting for my parts to arrive I started work on the FSM itself. I had searched for a week or so for a good LEGO-made set of tubing, but the price-per-foot took it completely out of my price range - and the thinness of the available tubing didn't give me the look I was going for. Thanks to some friendly advice on JLug.net, I checked out some local hobby supply stores. It was there that I found some perfect yellow tubing intended for a gas line on a model airplane or remote controlled car. Twenty feet of that ran me about the same as four feet of much thinner LEGO tubing. I hated to compromise and make this project less than 100% LEGO parts, but sometimes you have to compromise in the name of style.
Here's a shot of the FSM that now sits atop the roof of the church. The two "meatballs" are actually LEGO boulders. I went through several iterations on the eyes, finally deciding on the style here. It was the easiest to "read" as eyestalks - the others looked cool, but weren't as true to the existing images of the FSM.
The secret of this construction is a couple of TECHNIC girders with connecting pins embedded into the hidden ends of the "noodles". If there's any demand for it, I'll work up a little LEGO CAD drawing of it.
The next project I tackled was this mural. At this point I was still envisioning an open "courtyard" where mini-figures could hang out and drink. The walls of of the courtyard would showcase the various murals and give my little drunkards something to look at. Eventually I had to abandon the courtyard concept due to space limitations and the murals were moved to the interior walls of the church proper.
Anyway, back to making the murals: Trying to pixilate graphics and then convert to the odd brick shape available to me made for an interesting challenge. I considered building the murals in a more "traditional" top-down method (where you'd see the top of each brick, rather than the side) but the resulting scale was too tall for the walls I had planned. The "side view" method I ended up using had the advantage that the image is visible from both sides - allowing me to use the same batch of bricks to decorate both the interior and exterior.
All in all, my first attempt at mural building resulted in a fairly recognizable copy of Niklas Jansson's image:
That mural only took a half hour or so to piece together - so I bit the
bullet and decided to try for the harder of the two murals I had planned
at that stage:
I knew I would never be able to duplicate Michaelangelo's art, nor Niklas
Jansson's for that matter. So I decided to LEGO-ize the image as well.
The end result is definitely in my style, sad as that may be.
You can see the beginnings of the architectural framework around this mural. Unlike the Pirate Fish above, this mural is actually two bricks thick in places. This was due to a lack of 1x1 parts in certain colors - as well as needing to use preprinted 2x2 bricks for the correct offset on "Adam's" eyes. The problem, though, is that this is still a "one sided" mural. The smile on "Adam's" face is actually a frown on the other side of the brick. Not exactly the happy image I wanted to present...
In addition, the "two bricks thick" description only was true for portions of the mural. I'd end up making a duplicate of this mural with a different smile and a "true" two bricks thick style by the end of construction.
Next Up: The Doomed Courtyard begins
to take shape
Construction Pages: [ 1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 ]
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