I love a good 30-Day Challenge. You can do pretty much anything for 30 days. It’s a fun way to start a new habit, try something on for size, or make a statement. You can participate in NaNoWriMo, Inktober, Movember, or any of the other many month-long events. I had decided to pull out my neglected LEGO Architecture Studio set and build 30 bits of construction in 30 days.
It turned out that, for me, LEGO isn’t an easy thing to do every day for a month. There are a lot of bits to get out, and it takes up a lot of space. So I cut myself some slack and just committed to doing 30 builds in as close to 30 days as I could. It ended up being more than 30 days, but I’m done with all 30 builds now, finally finishing the challenge. It was an interesting exercise, especially the way I went about it. Check out my kick off post from May.
Though I started out by building one structure a day, life happened, and then I started building them a few at a time. Then six at a time. Then, after way too much time had passed, 18 at a time. After my marathon building session of 18 different structures, I learned some things.
I learned that it’s easier overall to build 18 things in one sitting than to sit down 18 times to build one thing each time.
I learned that the way for me to be creative when building with LEGO is the same way I am creative when I write: I look at what I need to do, think about things or look around, and then do a bit of quick free association with what I find. Then I go in the direction my thoughts take me. This helped me build a lot of different structures at the end there, with only one semi-repeat because my brain likes to follow the same mental pathways, apparently.
I learned that sometimes my creativity leads me down pretty boring paths, and other times I end up creating something I really like.
For the first 12 builds, most of them were copied from or inspired by buildings in the idea book that was included in the set. But the final 18 were all from my own ideas. There were some variations on a theme, for sure, but I thought some of them were pretty unusual, and I really like quite a few of them.
Here are several of my favorites, but visit my website to see the whole collection. These are probably my favorites because I just like looking at them, or would want to explore them if they were life-size.
Check out my original review for the LEGO Architecture Studio set. If you can get your hands on it, it’s a fantastic set for those who love to build houses, buildings, or other architectural structures.
