After captivating builders for nearly 90 years, LEGO recently unveiled its first Dragon Ball set, the “11390 Dragon Ball: Shenron & Goku.” Naturally, fans were quick to take notice—and what a spectacular debut for the Eternal Dragon.
Japanese LEGO builder DeRa (@deraLEGO), the recent university graduate previously featured for his Legendary-version Godzilla model kit, has also resurfaced one of his earlier creations: a custom LEGO Shenron. The finished build took around a year of repeated trial and error, and it has once again become a major talking point online.
DeRa says he had dreamed of building Shenron out of LEGO ever since elementary school. He did not have enough pieces back then, so he decided to save the idea for another day. The biggest challenge was finding a way to capture both the dragon’s “layered scales” and “long, twisting body,” all while keeping costs and the number of different pieces he needed to order as low as possible.
The finished creation measures 3 meters long and 90 centimeters tall. There were two main reasons it ended up being so enormous.
First, following DeRa’s ideal construction method naturally resulted in a build of this size. The second reason was much simpler: he just wanted to make it big. Larger creations cost more and can easily lose finer details, so DeRa generally believes a Custom Build is better when it is smaller—but he went all-in on this one anyway.
The pieces shown here were each used more than 100 times and make up most of Shenron’s body. Although the dragon uses four colors, each color relies on only around two different piece types, making bulk orders much easier to manage.
DeRa was still a university student at the time, so his budget was limited to what he could earn from part-time jobs. While maintaining a baseline level of detail, he deliberately selected inexpensive pieces wherever possible. The 1×2 rounded plates used most extensively cost as little as 3 yen each. He ordered 5,000 of the green pieces alone, helping keep the overall cost down.
Akira Toriyama passed away while DeRa was working on the project. The sudden news came as a profound shock. Dragon Ball remains DeRa’s favorite manga, inspiring him to finish his LEGO Shenron as a tribute to its legendary creator.
What do you think of DeRa’s towering LEGO Shenron? There are bound to be plenty of talented LEGO builders among our readers. Maybe you have created something similar—or perhaps you have an even more ambitious masterpiece of your own. Either way, we would love to see it!
via： X@DeRa