As the calendar flips closer to Halloween, the usual suspects in home decor start to appear: plastic skeletons, cotton-ball cobwebs, and oversized inflatable pumpkins. For those of us who like to build our own decorations, the season often means turning to official LEGO sets like the haunted house or various spooky BrickHeadz. These are fun, to be sure, but the really interesting stuff often comes from the fan community, where builders are free to create whatever horrors, or in this case, arachnids, they can imagine. One such project is a brilliant and frankly unsettlingly realistic tarantula model that’s been making waves online.
What we’re looking at is a custom creation submitted to the LEGO Ideas platform by a builder known as Realestateagent. LEGO Ideas, for the uninitiated, is the company’s official crowdsourcing site where fan designs can be voted on; if a project gets 10,000 supporters, it enters a review phase where it could become an actual retail set. This particular tarantula stands out immediately for its lifelike posture and texture, achieving a look that feels far more organic than you’d expect from a pile of hard plastic bricks. It’s a build that perfectly captures the creepy-crawly spirit of the season, and it does so with a level of design ingenuity that deserves a closer look.
Designer: Realestateagent
The real masterstroke here is the parts usage, a concept LEGO fans call “NPU” or Nice Part Usage. The builder has used the common brown bush or plant piece to simulate the fine, bristly hairs, known as setae, that cover a tarantula’s legs. This is an inspired choice. The piece itself has a spiky, multi-pronged shape that, when layered repeatedly along the legs, creates a fuzzy, almost bristly texture that perfectly mimics the real thing (there’s a close-up image below). It’s a clever, outside-the-box application of an existing element that elevates the entire model from a simple representation to a detailed sculpture. This is the kind of creative problem-solving that defines the best custom LEGO builds.
Beyond the clever aesthetic, the model is also a neat bit of engineering. Composed of around 410 pieces, the tarantula is fully poseable. Making a spindly, eight-legged creature that doesn’t immediately collapse under its own weight is a real design challenge, requiring strong joints and a balanced center of gravity. According to the creator, the inspiration struck when they saw the brown bush pieces on a Pick-a-Brick wall at a LEGO store, and the project grew from there. The body uses a mix of curved slopes and tiles to create a more rounded, organic shape, with varied coloring that adds visual depth and realism.
Newly submitted to the LEGO Ideas forum, this LEGO Tarantula is currently looking for votes from the broader LEGO community so that it gets turned into a real, buyable box set. If you’d love to see that happen, give this MOC (My Own Creation) your vote on the LEGO Ideas website! However, the process from vote to retail set is often longer than one would expect, so if you’re in a bit of a rush to get your halloween decor in order for the year, there’s a PDF file on the Rebrickable website with detailed instructions.
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