Legos

History

Back in 1999, I was afraid to swim across the pool (the short way). It was simply too scary. As motivation, my mom told me if I swam across the pool without touching the bottom I could go to a new toy store I'd wanted to visit and pick out a toy. This worked. I swam across the pool all by myself (impressive, I know) and got to go to the toy store. After looking around, I picked out Lego set 6107 the Recon Ray. Its MSRP was $2.99, which is about $5.75 in 2025 dollars.

I still remember sitting at the table in our dining room, trying to follow the instructions to put it together. It was too hard for little me, and I had to get help from my Mom.

This started my lifelong (so far) love for Legos. I loved that you could get a set of a cool thing and play with it, then make it into something else. You could combine your Legos into bigger, better things and make anything you could think of.

Legos defined my childhood. I remember on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, I saw everyone memorializing the tragedy. Thinking I should join in, I used some Lego hinge pieces to build some twin towers that used the hinge pieces to 'really fall'. I was going to make a little Lego plane to crash into them when my parents explained that would be insensitive and had me take my twin towers apart.

Every year, I asked for Legos for my birthday and Christmas. As I became a teenager, either Santa or my parents would get me a little Lego set each year to carry on the tradition. Even as an adult, I remember my mom saying, "It's just not Christmas unless Alex gets his Legos."

I learned about the AFOL (Adult Fan Of Lego) community, which was a bunch of people who treated Legos as an expressive medium, creating amazing art. I joined the now-defunct MOCpages (MOC stands for My Own Creation) and posted a little, but I was hampered by my bad camera and frankly, I wasn't great at building Legos. My childhood experience wasn't enough to get me there.

As I got older, I kept getting Legos for my birthday and Christmas, sometimes even getting some pretty big sets.

My childhood Legos are still in my childhood home, but I've been collecting new Legos as an adult for 10 years now, which means I have a decently sized collection. I learned about Bricklink, a sort of ebay for individual Lego bricks, and have done a few orders over the years. After all that, I have enough Legos to make some cool stuff.

For the last several years, one of my new year's goals has been to create an original Lego creation. This helps me stay creative and also connect with my inner child. Even though I haven't always met my goal, I've amassed a collection of Lego creations that I'm proud of. I've been trying to figure out how to share them. In 2023, I bought a background and tried to take photos of a few of my Lego creations, but they turned out pretty badly. My camera and the lighting in my apartment just weren't up to snuff.

Finally, this year, I got a new phone with a great camera. I've also moved since 2023, and my apartment has a nice strong light in the kitchen with a big window, so I can get two sources of nice, bright light. With all of this, I decided to try once more to document my creations over President's Day weekend, and it worked!

The Beginning

I had been holding on to that background (a roller blind I ordered from the internet) for the purposes of Lego photography for years, and I set it up in my kitchen.

The results were amazing. I could take a photo on this roller blind using my phone camera (Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra if you're curious) and the pictures looked amazing. With minimal photo editing, (adjusting brightness and contrast mostly) I had professional-quality photos.

That weekend I took pictures of several older Lego creations I had built and posted them to my Lego Instagram account, which I cleverly named Alex Lyman Studios.

Social Media

Of course, if I was sharing these Lego creations, I wanted people to see them. I set off on a quest to gain followers. Over the course of the last three months, I discovered a few things:

• In order to gain followers, you need good content. This may be obvious, but nobody's going to follow you unless you're posting things they want to see.
• Not only do you need good content, you need to post regularly.
• The Instagram algorithm rewards you for being famous. The more people who like your posts, the more people they show your posts to. This is what enables 'going viral' online.
• You can't predict what people will like (or at least I can't). Some of my favorite creations are among my least-liked posts.

Once I had a few posts up that I was proud of, I started to follow other builders on Instagram whose creations I liked. Many of them followed me back upon seeing that I was also building cool stuff. I also told my friends and family about the account, and got a few followers there.

The vast majority of my followers, however, are fellow Lego fans. It's really satisfying to share my art with people who appreciate me as an artist. Each week, the number has slowly ticked up and now I have almost 300 followers!

I've tried to put out at least one creation each week. This pushes the limits of my creativity. Sometimes, I'll get inspiration from a single piece. The series below was inspired by these little animal pieces which are new Lego parts from the last year.

I've tried a bunch of different things over the last couple of months, like using colored paper as a background, or making single-picture posts.

Going Viral

While I haven't ever really gone viral, I have had some of my posts do very well. Sometimes, people will like my posts enough to share them to their stories. This really increases their reach. When enough people share my posts, a bunch of people who don't follow me see the posts and like them, so Instagram starts promoting them on people's explore pages. When this happens, a bunch more people see the posts, and this translates back to a few more followers!

Building

Of course, the best part of this hobby is creating new art with Legos. I love trying new things and being creative. As I build, I often find myself remembering where I got a certain part, who got that for me as a gift, and it makes me feel connected to them. Following a bunch of other talented builders on Instagram shows me new techniques and inspires me. My push to post 1-2 times each week helps me move from idea to idea and not get too hung up tweaking any one creation. For now, I plan on finishing out the calendar year with over 52 posts. I don't know if I'll keep it up beyond that, but for now I love having this hobby.

So what are you waiting for? Follow me here!