One of the things I’ve been working on this week was a LEGO snake belt buckle. This was one of the more unusual model requests I’ve gotten and it was an interesting challenge. My client asked me to make a LEGO replica of an actual belt buckle. Any sort of organic shape can be difficult, so creating the the look and feel of the real belt buckle including the snake skin and the glass eyes made for a fun build.
The glass eye took me a little time to figure out. Although the purists out there might consider it “cheating.” The way I ended up getting the eye to look just right was by chopping the knobs (or studs) off of a 1×2 black plate and then fitting them into a 1×1 backwards round plate. I can say with fair certainty that this is a new technique, I know I’ve never seen it before. If any one has, feel free to correct me. 😉
On the whole the model only took me about a day to design. I’d never made a snake before. Now that I’ve designed it, my brother suggested that I try designing a snake with some sort of snake-like pattern. It was tricky enough to make the snake, especially with all the SNOT (studs not on top) that I put into it.
When I was at LEGOLAND one of my coworkers created a rattlesnake for the Wild Woods Golf Course. I can remember how much trouble he had trying to keep to the pattern with all the twists and turns of the body. Adding any sort of design often makes a model much harder and much more interesting. 😀
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