member led instructions

[Josh]

We talked about members giving instructions/tutorials/etc at meetings.  What would you like to know more about?

I’d really like to know easy ways to use GIMP (don’t want to pay for photoshop) to remove backgrounds and make things pretty.  I guess that also goes hand and hand with how to take pictures of things.  Evan brought his lightbox though, and that just seems to be the magic wand.

[Rich Millich]

Since Doug showed a laptop / overhead connection at the CMF swap at CMU, if he’s willing to load GIMP onto it, I’d be happy to show the techniques for removing a MOC from its background. I use this exact method for converting and sprucing up my photos, and once shown, others can get hands-on experience while the rest of us razz the person learning it firsthand in front of everybody else. 😉 There’s no better way to learn than hands-on! I have a few pictures I still need to refine for posting this way, and I could brush up my technique well before showing it and refine the instructions as I go. As long as Doug’s laptop would have room left for a USB mouse, which we’d all need for such delicate work, this is the best suggestion I can come up with at the moment.

Second, I would really love members to share their established techniques for building certain MOCs. Dan can do Pirate ships, Doug can show various castle techniques, you can show mosaics, and so on. Each one of these styles involves different base bricks, different connection techniques, and different approaches to structure. It’s even possible for a LUGer to break down a physical build into small components for everyone there to get hands-on learning, which is useful. I want to learn more about what YOU guys build, so I can expand my knowledge… after all, for example, in my case Doug’s castle techniques can build hangar bay walls, your mosaics can translate into brick built floor designs, Dan’s Pirate ship knowledge might spawn some insights on bow and stern shaping or insights on small minifig items like brick built barrels and things. And that’s just the start. My point is that everyone can learn from everyone else, and we can even invite all comers to share in what we’re learning too. These events should be public to every AFOL who loves a particular LEGO genre, and might be the best way to garner new members.

Further, I have been eager to share my basic techniques on building my minifig starfighter builds, and we can use the LUG brick for that once it’s sorted to create packages of set pieces for everyone to work with once it’s inventoried well or accessible in sorted form. I’d need significant time with the parts to know what’s possible based on what we have (and would be interested in buying what we don’t have), but I could put that tutorial together nicely, both for standard building techniques, and then some freestyle building too. This, as I have mentioned, if done in October, this is a great lead-in for the NNoVVember flickr event which is the highlight of my LEGO year. If we use the same parts to generate a basic cockpit box, then we can return those same parts to the LUG parts without fail once all the builds are done.

Thoughts?

[Author]

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