Lego Minifigure Costume Build, Part 1

The vision for this year’s Halloween house is that visitors can feel like they are the size of toys, encountering large Lego spaceships, towers and props as if they themselves were the size of Lego minifigures.

To greet those visitors, we thought we should dress as Lego minifigures, to fully complete the scene. So, we decided to create several different minifigure costumes, representing many of the Lego realms—Batman, generic Lego person, Unikitty, Emmet, Wyldstyle, Professor Mcgonagall, Ninjago Sensei Wu, and Benny the retro Lego spaceman.

But how to do it? There are several online tutorials for how to make costumes – from very simple to very accurate and complex. In the end, we decided to create a version of the Lego minifig costume that was sort of in the middle – accurate but which also allowed for mobility and sitting. So, we opted for a style similar to what is pictured below – Lego head + torso.

I began creating the costume by working on the Lego heads. For the head shape, I found (thanks to a suggestion online) giant 12″ diameter cardboard tubes at my local hardware store, which I believe are used to pour concrete footings. I cut them to the proportions of a Lego head.

Next, for the helmets, hats and hair which go on to those heads, I decided to take a page from the world of foam costume creation and use the EVA gray foam interlocking mats (found in most hardware stores) to build those.

I followed tutorials like this one from Evil Ted on how to create rounded shapes and build foam domes which I then connected to other foam to create Benny’s space helmet.