HaRdLUG
Hampton Roads LEGO User Group
BIG NEWS: LEGO STORE NOW OPEN AT VIRGINIA BEACH TOWN CENTER
Next HaRdLUG Monthly Meeting:
Sunday, 12 November at 1 pm at ODU
(4211 Monarch Way, Norfolk, VA)
Here are some things we've built recently:
280 Gallon Fish Tank
Medieval Village
About us:
HaRdLUG is a group of adults and older teens in the cities of Hampton Roads, Virginia using LEGO to connect with our local community and each other and celebrating that play is something you never outgrow.
We build to challenge ourselves, to relax, or for a creative outlet.
We use LEGO to share stories, to learn, or to teach.
We follow the latest product releases and innovations, and we dive deep into LEGO history.
We make it up as we go, or we follow instructions. We might even write our own instructions.
We value creativity, collaboration, and community.
We share our passion for LEGO by displaying what we build at public events throughout our region, and are always looking for fun new partnerships which match our volunteer members' interests with the goals of organizations hosting community events.
We have monthly meetings where we usually share some of the projects we are personally working on, plan for future events and collaborative displays, and occasionally have a building challenge or activity.
Our next meeting is 12 November from 1-3pm at Innovation Research Park #2 at 4211 Monarch Way, Norfolk, VA. We plan to return to our previous location at Norfolk Botanical Garden in 2024.
HaRdLUG FishWhere to find us next:
Chesapeake Conference Center
700 Conference Center Drive Chesapeake, VA
13 January 2024
with the Hampton Roads Naval Museum
Virginia Beach Sports Center
1045 19th Street, Virginia Beach, VA
03 February 2024
Fredericksburg Expo Center
2371 Carl D Silver Pkwy, Fredericksburg, VA
09-10 March 2024
Brick Convention cancelled their event planned for Hampton VA in October 2023. 🙁
We are hopeful that HaRdLUG will be able to work with them when they are ready to reschedule.
What We've Done Lately:
HaRdLUG has been active in southeast Virginia since 2002. If you visit the Norfolk Botanical Garden (NBG), you can see our architectural models in the Baker Hall Visitor Center showing two exciting new structures coming as part of the "Garden of Tomorrow" campaign. In addition to previously having our monthly meetings at NBG , we were also part of their Butterfly and Honeybee Festivals last summer. We displayed at Tidewater Comicon and celebrated the NASA Artemis mission with a LEGO building event at Norfolk's Slover Library. With the Hampton Roads Naval Museum's Brick-by-Brick LEGO Shipbuilding event back live and in person in 2023, we built and brought all of our best boats!
At this year's BrickFair in Chantilly, Virginia, we built a 560-square foot LEGO display (that's 28 big folding tables!) including a collaborative build of a huge medieval village and seaport, two enormous airports, a 280-gallon Lego aquarium, the battleship Arizona, a F4U Corsair, motorized Dragonboat Race, Adventurers scene, WWII battle, 10x-scale Deka Bricks, Pout-Pout Fish, microscale Newport News Shipbuilding, Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring (with real water), and a lot more!
Some of our partners for past events include:
Hampton Roads Naval Museum in Norfolk
Virginia Aquarium in Virginia Beach
Army Transportation Museum in Yorktown
Children's Museum of Virginia in Portsmouth
Mariners Museum, Newport News
Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach
Virginia Living Museum in Newport News
Public Libraries in Chesapeake and Norfolk
Southside Harley Davidson, Virginia Beach
Various Model Train Shows
Various Comicon-Type Events
BrickFair Virginia (Chantilly), Alabama, & Fredericksburg, VA
BrickUniverse Raleigh
BrickFestLive Hampton
Want To Be A Better Builder?
There are a lot of great ways to up your brick-building game. The best one is to just start building. The key to doing anything well is being willing do it poorly, over and over, until you get better. Your first new creations you make might not look like some of the impressive builds you've seen online, but keep on building and you'll learn and get better each time.
Assembling official LEGO sets from instructions, especially the ones with higher age ranges on the box, is one great way to introduce yourself to building techniques and some of the new parts available.
Tips&Bricks is a prolific creator of infographics to share techniques from some of the latest creations by amazing builders throughout the AFOL community.
Former LEGO set designer Tiago Catarino shares instructions and video tutorials for his creations (as well as doing set reviews and such on his YouTube channel).
Jason Allemann makes LEGO move, in all sorts of ways. And he has a website, JK Brickworks, full of instructions and videos. He's also turned a couple of his ideas into official sets through LEGO Ideas.
At Towering Brick Creations, Deepak Shenoy (Deep Shen) has several great articles on building techniques (and the math behind them, if you're into that sort of thing) that he uses in large architectural builds. Also, he does some great mosaics. Check out his Instagram feed, or read the feature on him at The Brothers Brick.
Just want to know more about all things LEGO? Read a LEGO fan media site like bricknerd.com, with hundreds of articles spanning a huge range of subjects.
Tom Alperin wrote a book about LEGO and architecture, but he is probably known equally well in the community for freely sharing ideas (and labels) for LEGO organization.
Come to a HaRdLUG meeting! We love to share ideas. If we aren't an expert in what you want to learn, we might know someone who is!
"Do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are HaRd." - John F. Kennedy