It’s contest time! We want you to design a LEGO® model that includes one or more elements traditionally associated with the construction industry – like the digger scoop, girder and the hardhat. The catch? The subject of your creation must not be construction industry-related! 

In September, it was such a thrill to return to the wonderful Skærbæk Fan Weekend in Denmark, 3 years on... like nothing had happened... and run another of our popular LEGO® building workshops! 50 participants from around the world were given 100 minutes to build whatever they liked – they simply had to include one or more of the special selection of 2022  elements that we provided. Bucketloads of random parts were also provided, and as you can imagine it's quite the challenge. Especially first thing on a Sunday morning after a Saturday night in Skærbæk.

Get a closer look at what they came up with later in the article - and we hope that it inspires your own building!

It's time to announce the winners of our Make a Wishbrick contest, where we asked readers to dream up  ideas for a new LEGO® element - and then build it out of existing LEGO parts. We received an astonishing 276 entries, making this a tough one for our judges to decide as there could only be three recipients of a 10497 Galaxy Explorer and one winner of the top prize - 76218 Sanctum Sanctorum!

It’s contest time! Did you know that there are more than 3700 unique LEGO® elements in the official LEGO inventory? That’s a big selection, but do you ever feel that it’s just not enough?

We’d love to see what new original part you could dream up, and to make this contest more challenging, we’re getting a bit meta: we want to see your dream element built out of LEGO bricks.  

Thanks to support from the LEGO Group, you could win a Sanctum Sanctorum or Galaxy Explorer!

Chris, can you start by giving us a bit of a rundown on how this new series of models that you originally designed as a fan came to be an official product? Did you bring it to LEGO or did they suggest it to you? Because a few people have been like, “oh, we saw that coming. That's why TLG hired him…"

Chris: It certainly wasn't like that! Everything I've done with the company has been by the standard processes... there hasn't been any anything that's just like "hey yeah, let's do this because we like what you do”. So it was me who brought it to the company. When you first get to LEGO, every day, every week, it's a new adventure. So after I had been there a couple of months, people started to get excited about this event. It’s what we call Creative Boost, and it's where we designers can propose different ideas and whatnot. And I thought, I don't have time, I'm invested in what I'm doing right now, I’ll just have to wait until the next one... but towards the end of week, I said to myself, no, just remake some of your Brick Sketches!

It is finally time to reveal which five LEGO® creations from our contest, Switch My Lantern Up, will be receiving the prizes of LEGO® Fiat 500s! We were going to announce them yesterday but it has been such a tough one to judge, and there were 88 models submitted using the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581).


This time the judges were Victor Pruvost and Tim Johnson from New Elementary, and none other than the LEGO Senior Designer who actually designed the lantern piece, Esa Nousiainen! We were honoured to have him and he was really impressed with what he saw:

Today we reveal the final 25 entries to our LEGO® building contest, where you had to find a new use for the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581). The judges' decisions will be published on Saturday, unless we argue about it for too long! Hard when there are so many awesome ideas!

Old Diving Suit by GSCLD

Today we continue revealing the entries to our LEGO® building contest, where you had to find a new use for the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581). Let's see what the next 30 entries were!

Peacock by Krakenbrix

In this build, I used the seed part as feathers for a peacock. The feathers are attached to a wedge belt tire (part 2815 and 4185) to obtain the radial design.

Our LEGO® building contest, where you had to find a new use for the Super Heroes lantern (part 65581) has now closed, so while our judges are getting all judgey and deciding which five win the LEGO Fiats, let's look at all the entries we received!

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The world heavyweight of LEGO® building contests, Iron Builder is underway and the results of the first round in the Iron Forge are in! There were 120 entries from over 60 builders and only the top 20 progress to Round 2, which whittles the 20 down to eight.

The seed part was minifigure legs. Here are the 20 winners in no particular order, other than that we have arranged them into the groups they will be completing within in the next round. Bring on the NPU!

Top 20 builders, Iron Forge Round 1

Ted A.

Some builders are bred for greatness, and others are just bread to be toasted. It's a Wonder some have even made it this far... "Boom! Toasted!"

Iron Builder returns! And you can participate. This is great news for anyone who is still looking for advanced LEGO® building challenges (if Ryan Howerter’s REC puzzles and New Elementary’s “Switch Up My Lantern” contest aren't enough for you, that is!).

We love Iron Builder for its mind-blowing NPU and cheeky sense of humour and we intend to share a lot of news about it here on New Elementary. To kick things off, we figured it has been gone for a while and many of you may have no idea what we are talking about. So we collared two of the Iron Builder admin team, Simon Liu and Markus Rollbühler, to give us the lowdown on IB 2020 and how – for the first time ever – anyone can get involved.

Welcome back to the Reverse-Engineering Challenge, or REC for short. Simply look at these small LEGO builds, and try to figure out how they are built. Always assume the hidden side is identical. The colours are irrelevant. No rubber bands and no flex tubing allowed! It's not a contest, there are no prizes – think of it more like a daily crossword puzzle. Solve as many as you like, at your own pace. Solutions are posted every Sunday at https://linktr.ee/rhowerter.

REC17 Halhi141 

Bottom looks like the top.

This contest is now closed. See the amazing entries here!

Time to see what you readers can build; yes it's a new LEGO® building competition!


We're asking you to make an amazing creation using a new piece; we want you to "switch up" the lantern element from the DC Comics CMFs by building something completely different with it. Don't use the lantern as a lantern – instead, impress us with your imagination and ingenuity!

Welcome back to the Reverse-Engineering Challenge, or REC for short. Simply look at these small LEGO builds, and try to figure out how they are built. Always assume the hidden side is identical. The colours are irrelevant. No rubber bands and no flex tubing allowed! It's not a contest, there are no prizes – think of it more like a daily crossword puzzle. Solve as many as you like, at your own pace. Solutions are posted every Sunday at https://linktr.ee/rhowerter.

REC5 by Ryan Howerter

If you’re looking for some fun and good LEGO® building challenges and ideas, we can help! Today there’s a piece of great news for advanced LEGO builders: our friend and contributor Ryan Howerter is launching a daily building challenge on their Instagram. It will give your LEGO brain a good workout and definitely teach you new techniques.


It’s called the Reverse-Engineering Challenge, or REC for short, and you may be familiar with the concept already as four of these have been run on Flickr in the past. Here’s how it works.

Ryan posts a small LEGO build, and you try to figure out how it is built.