One of my kid’s favorite books is Cabinhead and Treehead by Scott Campbell (insta, web). So, this year we built models of the titular characters.
If you want to try your hand at building your own the instructions and parts lists are below.
Treehead
Cabinhead
Design Interation
A challenge of capturing existing characters in bricks is figuring out a scale that works for the character to be “read” as what it is designed to represent. Originally, I tried a smaller scale than the roughly 6 x 6 stud scale I ended up with but after a few attempts it was clear that to capture the wideset eyes I would need some space.
The second challenge is deciding on the “mouth pose”. Depending on the scene the characters have silly sort of chins/lips or big grins. I took a few swings at capturing the lips but it wasn’t reading right. So, we made the wide grins that appear on the cover- the end result is silly and charming.
Color Selection
For this build I used GoBricks from the online vendor BrickWith.com. The primary reason for GoBricks is that the colors we ended up liking, Olive Green and Dark Orange, did not have parts available from the Dutch-brand. And frankly, sourcing parts with BrickWith is was easier than any other option.
The parts from BrickWith came packaged by model and I experienced zero missed parts in the few sets I audited.