Is Mini Figure Customization Dead?

[Project Black Brick]

The hobby of creating and designing your own Lego minifigures seems to be a dying community within Lego. Going back 10 years or further Lego customization of minifigures was once a very popular topic where creative people would share their own work and methods of creating a minifigure unique to them or a certain theme. Yet as times go on I see less and less creative minds building unique figures but why is that? Has the detailed quality of official Lego minifigures reached a point which surpasses most enthusiasts built custom minifigures?  Or is it the aftermarket offering more choices in Lego like weapons, helmets, armor ect at an affordable price? But what are your own thoughts on this matter?

[SpacePolice89]

I can only speak for myself but I prefer the official minifigures and I don't like modifying and damaging minifigures. It has nothing to do with details because I prefer the more simple designs from the 80s and 90s. With so many themes and minifigs released since 1978 I guess there is almost some minifig for every occasion so maybe there is less need for customized ones nowadays?  

[MAB]

It depends what you mean by customization. It seems that there is still plenty of purist customization going on, where custom figures are made without destroying parts. There is also a much wider range of purist prints and colours available these days so there is less incentive to paint or draw on figures. The increased number of licensed themes means that there is a lot more variety in minifigure parts than there used to be. There is also a wide range of weapons and so on, so I think that has had an effect on the use of third party parts. I used to buy a fair bit from brickforge and brickwarriors, but LEGO has made their own versions of many of the parts I used to buy from them.

I imagine the number of licenses LEGO makes minifigures for, and also the rise of the custom printed minifigure companies or other IPs from the Chinese clone brands, has meant that people tend not to make one offs these days as just about anything you can think of is available.

[Wardancer]

I have a somewhat similar feeling. For example I began customizing when there was a Custom Minifigure Contest here at the forum. Unthinkable  today. Also the Colossal Castle Contest had a custom category for a few years. This disappeared as well.

One reason might be the proliferation of third party products. Aliexpress for example. I have found a few new companies like cultbricks in Germany, whose products often sell out within minutes. Or Ktownbricks in the US. Capemadness also seems to be back after they got kicked from Bricklink. So some are still thriving. Nicebricks makes nothing new any more and customminifigureintelligence is also dead.

I have the suspicion that the death of customization might be a matter of perception in a shifting social media landscape. Flickr has limited groups to 30 for a picture. And Flickr was a niche anyway. Maybe one should check one‘s media preferences. For example on Instagram there seems to be a lot of customizers I had not known before. I am actually thinking of shifting my media presence to Instagram as well.

[CDKiii]

There is still lots of people who make their own design. Maybe the way of customization has changed. We can see more and more "hard" customization, with minifig body becoming less recognizable (some parts will replace the torso, with pouches, muscles etc...). I've seen a kickstarter project for doing hoodies for example).

I think purists will increase because of the wide range of genuine designs, hard customization is increasing thanks to 3d printing, so middle customization is decreasing.

[Hammerstein NWC]

The minifig customization community is thriving just not here at Eurobricks. 
 

one thing to bear in mind is that Lego produces so many licenses now that a lot of the customs we used to have to make - superheroes, starwars etc. are now thriving franchises. If you look more over at instagram you will see that people are still making customs every day. The metamorphosis of figs that break the traditional legs body and head model is being pushed everyday by companies working using Lego parts such as citizen brick, eclipsegrafx to people like Jin.customs who are building adds on to minifigs making them more size appropriate.

companies like beickaffliction are making the model “realistic” molds which are more akin to wargames figs like games workshop.

 

the customs community is thriving more than ever but for me personally I see it more as sub culture of Lego rather than the building roots most of us are more connected with.

 

[kurigan]

I've though about this and I have thoughts. My assessment is that it's Lego's influence. There's the same amount of customizers out there as 10 or so years ago, nut few new ones. Of those new to the craft they tend to have a more technological approach, incorporating things like 3D design and printing rather than sculpting and painting. The rest is because the community is saturated with purists, people who are fans of Lego and licensed products before the system and what they can do with it themselves. It's just symptomatic of Lego becoming less about creativity under the guise of being more accessible. I think a lot of us are just giving up,on sharing if not customizing entirely. There just isn't a community for it anymore because of prevailing attitudes towards purism and a desire to have rather than make. Heck; I shared the result of a afternoon's distraction, tickled that it came out as well as it did and hoping other here would share my amusement. The post went largely ignored but to be told I should have just ordered an after market part from a third party or not bothered at all if I wasn't going to 3D print it, or what ever. Seriously, some user actually DMed me a link to their store. This is the first time I've checked this forum in months and while I'm not surprised to see that the first offering is purists, I am to see this topic broached. Oh well, I'm used to being the black sheep at this point. I'm sure I'm in the minority and completely out of line and will likely be told so, but I'm betting my file transfer on the other system is done so I'll log back for another few months and get back to what I was doing.

 

Cheers!

[CDKiii]

You should be right, the lego influence on creativity. But some of us stand!