Kodama - Tree Spirit From Princess Mononoke

Thank you all for your help reaching the first 200 supporters in under 4 days!

To celebrate this happy event, I wanted to highlight one detail of my project that you may have missed on the first glance: the little green bug sitting on the leaf in front of the Kodama.

This may be a minor detail, but it took me a bit to get it right, so I thought it would be nice to show you how it was done:

The bug was built with 12 parts: The Nexo Knights shield (22385) with leaf pattern comes from the Tinkerbell BrickHeadz from set 40622. I don't own this set, but I picked up a couple of those beautiful printed tiles from PaB back when they became available and am quite happy that I now found a way to incorporate one of them into one of my builds.

Also noteworthy is the "Tile Modified with clip on top" in lime. In this color, that part only ever was included in one set so far, the 2022 Star Wars advent calendar. The part is used to attach the legs, and since I only own one of those in lime, I had to use another color on the backside (not visible in my official pictures). It's not too bad though, the more common color variants in Pearl Gold and sand green work just as fine. However, this may highlight one of the challenges that you frequently run into when trying to build your projects with real bricks: you obviously can only use color variants that have been released by LEGO at some point, and even if the parts exist, some of them can be surprisingly rare.

The build uses "Minifigure, Weapon Gun, Blaster with Studs on Sides, Bottom, and Front" (part ID 44709) as a core. It's such a useful part for smaller builds due to its many connection points and the angled bar. Definitely something one shouldn't bury in the drawer with lesser useful Minifigure utensils!

The build itself is fairly simple but sturdy. The bug can be attached with a "Tile, Round 1 x 1 with Bar and Pin Holder" (20482) to one of the "studs with hole" on the leafs.

And that's it for today. I hope you liked my little "How to". Have fun building and please support my projects if you haven't already.

Cheers, Martin a.k.a. Klemmplem

Thanks to everyone that helped me reach 100 Supporters in the first 24 hours. To celebrate this happy event, I took my little friend for a walk in the forest.

I think he likes it much better here than on my dusty desk.

Also I just learned why Kodamas are white: To make it easier to find their parts on the forest floor (R.I.P. Kodama's left eye).