Hey! I figured that I should actually use my blog for well... blogging. So here's something I did recently! First though, I'll yap about a LEGO set.
LEGO 21340 "Tales of the Space Age" is a 2023 set from Ideas line. It is made of 4 postcard-like dioramas*, themed around space exploration.
It's a pretty neat set! Definitely one of the better shelf warmers LEGO put out in the last few years... Well most of is.
"Into the unknown" is one of the 4 cards from this set (the rightmost one in the picture.) It features a black hole and the surface a planet with green atmosphere. It's also the last card you build, and it's... fine. Not bad by any means, but it doesn't really do anything that the previous 3 cards you build do as well.
When I got this set I didn't think much of the green card and put it away on a dusty shelf.
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From now on there will be spoilers for Project Hail Mary. I'm not really the one to glaze something, but I do highly recommend it! If this movie seems even a bit interesting, You'll probably like it!
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OK so this green card is a near perfect representation of Adrian, right???
Just replace the black hole with Hail Mary and you got yourself a pretty solid diorama of the fishing scene! When I first realized that I didn't really feel like building it though. It’s been a while since I did something with LEGO. And surely someone already did that? It WAS kinda popular to make new cards with other space related scenes a few years ago.
Well... apparently not, as I couldn't find anything. This finally gave me an incentive to start modifying the card. And about an hour later I got this...
(apologies for bad photos, I'm NOT good at taking or editing them)
This is the first draft where I tried to get some ideas I had for this out. It's a decent start! Tried to do Mary from memory, so she's a bit inaccurate. The chain worked out great though! I also decided to change original card's black surface to dark green, to better represent Adrian's clouds, and that definitely was a good call. Didn't really do anything with entry fires yet.
From this point I already had some ideas for improvements. Mary should be a brick or 2 higher from her current position, which meant that I had to find a longer chain piece. I also had to look for every dark green curved slope I had.
The next day I was mainly looking for pieces that that I was interested in. Some chain and string pieces, and dark green ones too, which, as it turned out, I have very few of!
I did some tinkering on Hail Mary and the clouds as well. Mostly to see what else I could do with them. The following day I focused on finishing this mod, which brings me to...
The final build! I made some further adjustments to Mary after looking up a proper reference. Kinda wish the fuel tanks were a bit better, but there's not much else that could be done at this scale. I ended up using the longer chain piece and did so by hiding the excess chain on the card's hollow backside. With the fire I tried to do something similar to the comet featured on the blue card, and it worked out fairly well! Finally I tinkered with the clouds some more and got a good enough result.
And that's basically it! It'd be nice if Mary was green as well, but I have a rather limited selection of green pieces. At one point I also tried to add auroras as well, but it would be fairly difficult to make them look good.
Overall, I'd consider this an upgrade over the original green card. Now I have little memento of a movie I really liked! And it didn't even cost a ridiculous price!