From Lagers to LEGO: Finding Midlife Creativity

Today’s guest post comes to us from Jesse Gros who shares how he found LEGO, collected hundreds of thousands of pieces, and built something amazing that sparked a personal creative resurgence.

For years, I would come home after work and crack open a beer, or two… or three. 

Some of this ritual was to help me relax and take the edge off at the end of the day. But not every day was a hard day. Not every day had an edge that needed to be smoothed. Underneath it all was this chronic feeling that I needed to be doing something more creative. I tried painting, woodwork, and creative writing… none of them satiated my pent-up creative energy. 

One day, my daughter got her first LEGO set. Several minutes into helping her build Moana’s Ocean Voyage (41150), something happened… a simple, familiar joy filled my body. Memories of my childhood LEGO building flooded in. It was wild. 

In the Beginning…

That evening, I went to Target and bought the Ninjago Lighthouse Siege set (70594). I worked on it until past midnight. The next day, I bought another Ninjago set. I called my dad to see if he still had our huge LEGO trunk in the attic. Yes, he did! That week, I went to a LEGO store for the first time and discovered the Pick-A-Brick wall! I left with six large cups of pure potential. It felt so indulgent to spend $125 on LEGO parts. I had no idea what was coming.

That week I discovered the custom-building community on YouTube, and fell down that rabbit hole. The first MOC video I watched was MetalBeard’s Castle on Beyond the Brick. I was mesmerized. I wondered, “Could I build something like that one day?”  

Baby Steps

One of my first custom builds was Tamatoa the Crab. I spent hours on it, and my daughter was delighted. I used Mixel joints (for the first time), and later I realized I should have grabbed four cups large of those precious pieces. PAB regret, it’s a very real thing. 

To be honest, I judged my first several MOCs harshly, and I stopped building for a bit. I felt deflated by the huge chasm between my ability and what I saw folks doing online. Luckily, I was saved by another YouTube video. A young builder was “reskinning” LEGO sets to make partial MOCS. I thought… “I can do this!” I found and bought two Destiny’s Bounty sets (70618) for the price of one at a going-out-of-business sale. I combined the sets into one massive ship, and then added some rotors and turned it into an airship. Voila! I had my first custom-ish LEGO creation that I was proud of. 

Piece Hunting

After my newfound confidence from the airship build, it didn’t take long for me to realize I was more interested in custom building than in buying LEGO sets. To build the big stuff I saw online, I was going to need large amounts of basic brick. With five PAB walls within an hour of my house, hunting for pieces turned into a part-time hobby. For almost two years straight, I called all of the stores on their delivery days looking for brick. I put many miles on my 4-Runner racing around Los Angeles County, trying to get the best pieces before they were picked over. It was such a thrill building up my cache of “art supplies.” 

But even those five stores were not enough to satiate my newfound hobby. I started sourcing my parts from PAB walls in Ohio, Florida and Texas, calling on friends to fill cups for me, and one time, in an act of desperation, hiring a Task Rabbit employee to fill six cups of dark red profile bricks, and send them in the mail. 

Time To Start Building

It was about this time that a friend of mine introduced the concept of consumption vs creation. She said to me, “Your consumption should not exceed your creation if you are really going to call yourself an artist.” She had a point. While I had become very adept at sourcing parts, my building had slowed substantially. I quit piece hunting cold turkey and faced the terrifyingly empty 18,432 studs of the eight blank baseplates where I planned to construct my first large-scale, fully-original MOC.  

The beginning was slow and scary. I kept freezing and changing my ideas. It didn’t help that I also discovered BrickLink; my saviour and my nemesis, delivering perfectly beautiful little bags of colored pieces in bubble wrap right to my door. Simultaneously, BrickLink is why my 8-year-old daughter may need to get a job soon. “Sorry dear, just remember, all of this LEGO will be yours one day.” 

When it was abundantly clear I didn’t need any more pieces to build my MOC—the stack of PAB cups was almost touching the ceiling—I finally got over the new-project-jitters and just… started.

Nine months later, “Out West” was completed. I showed it at Bricks LA, and I won my first LEGO award. During those glorious nine months, my after-work pints of beer were replaced by hours of building, sometimes into the wee hours of the night. The nervous energy that had been plaguing me for years started to disappear. My creativity had finally found its home.  

A Confidence Boost

Winning the “Fabulous Flora” award for the best nature build in my third year of building as an AFOL —and watching people’s in-person responses to my art at the convention—was the validation I needed to overcome my insecurities, and I really started to move forward with confidence. My next piece was a three-foot-long Diesel Punk Ship called “Captain Mayhem’s Party Parge.” This build was very challenging in the beginning due to all of the odd angles and SNOT building techniques. I had a couple of false starts and almost gave up.

Luckily, instead of giving up, I reached out to the AFOL communities on Facebook for help and received wonderful support. I was shocked by how generous people were with their time to walk me through techniques and offer up suggestions. The completed project with custom minifigs and interior was featured in a time-lapse video on Beyond the Brick. Another dream come true. 

Biggest Project Yet

My most recent project, Bilgewater, is a 60,000-piece, fantasy pirate village based on artwork from the League of Legends video game. It featured movement, 60+ individual LED lights and a printed backdrop. Five years after my AFOL journey began, with the support from the online community, Lugola, and many others, I won the “Best in Show” award at Bricks LA. Builders I had looked up to, for years, like Pam and Austin Henry-Biskup, had now become my peers, and I was even interviewed by Beyond the Brick.

Looking back over this past half-decade as an adult builder of LEGO, my life has changed in so many meaningful ways. The deep, personal satisfaction I get from building and the friends I have made in the LEGO community have made me a much more satisfied, balanced and directed person. Not that I was totally lost before, but within the AFOL community, I definitely feel found.

You can find Jesse on Instagram as westside_lego_daddy.

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published May 18, 2022.

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