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Lee Chi Wing

@citysoncreation

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LEGO NINJAGO is everything to me.... including my job :)
Senior Model Designer @ LEGO NINJAGO
All views are still my own though

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Set #21 is one that holds a special place in my heart, this is the one 2026 product I'm personally most excited for! 🔥

As a massive fan of the Titan Mechs, I have always dreamt of the day to get one for all 6 OG ninja, and maybe I can design at least one before we finish that. On the other hand, I have also been the biggest advocate in the office to give Nya a PROPER Titan Mech, as I do NOT agree that her Crystalized mech counts as one stylistically speaking haha 😝 Not to mention - finally a chance to design a Legends set!! This set is literally multiple dreams coming true to me! 🥲

I have seen some fans saying that we bundle Kai and Nya together because we don't believe in Nya... As a massive Nya fan myself who pitched the idea in the very first place, I can assure you that was NOT my intention. I came up with the idea as I thought it would be cool to finish the collection with a twin pack, as we have never done that, and it makes perfect sense given Kai and Nya being siblings.

My boss was immediately sold by the idea! However, when Jin and Mira (who I cannot talk about at the moment 👀) were introduced, it actually took me a LOT of hard work to convince all the right people to let me keep Kai and Nya in the set, I had to first convince my manager to introduce the exclusive mech pilot suits in the set, and THEN at the very last minute got marketing's support to put in Kai and Nya's heads as an option, then proceed to convince packaging team to feature them on the box front image... I kid you not I got emotional when I finally got the box in my hand, seeing that the mission is accomplished 🥺

In terms of design, this was a tough challenge as I want to make sure they fit the aesthetics of the Titan Mechs, but also stand out enough that it sells the idea of them being a Twin unit themselves, while ALSO being different enough between the two such that you aren't getting the same mech twice with a reskin - and then on top of it, as a Jaya fan, I also wanted to make sure that Nya's mech would pair with Jay's 💙

There is still much to say about this set and I hope to do a proper write-up later... (hitting word limits sigh😕)

#lego #ninjago #2026 by @citysoncreation

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5 months ago

Set #19 The Old Town is for sure the most ambitious product I have ever worked on (yet)! Not only is it HUGE, I was also given the privilege to drive the stickers and minifigures selection, while simultaneously working on the $100 Blacksmith (and THE CAR, of course). It was certainly the most insane couple of months ever at work, but to see the overwhelming reaction from the NINJAGO fans yesterday upon reveal – I think all the hard work has paid off 🥲

I want to start by giving a huge shoutout to the graphics team - Mike, Milla, Renato, Nathan and Franciska! They spent so much time discussing with me on every detail, indulging me with all my requests and the constant changes in choices of references and minifigures… The minifig lineup, for instance, has at least changed 15 times, and I promise the first version is NOTHING compared to the final version! Also big thanks to my building buddy Marin, model coach Pierre and building instruction expert Linette, who spent a total of 6 days with me in the meeting room building through the model twice, making sure this humongous complex model easy enough for anyone to build 🙏

I think I can talk about this product forever, but I will save some for the writeups… There were so many things I wanted to achieve with it: I wanted it to be something special and unique for our big 15, something that brings people the same excitement I had back when I first saw Temple of Airjitzu or the first NINJAGO City; I wanted it to have the level of complexity people expect from our D2Cs; I wanted it to celebrate every part of the NINJAGO history; I wanted it to have good value for $300; I wanted it to be a complete set that you can be happy IF this is the only NINJAGO set you get this year; I wanted it to be more than just a nice display but celebrates the roots of NINJAGO being a theme that inspires play and imagination, and I wanted a minifigure lineup SO EPIC that people wouldn’t even believe it if leaked! I hope I have delivered on all of the above… but most importantly, I hope the fans will be happy when they get their hands on this product, for this is very much my ultimate love letter to NINJAGO ❤️

#lego #ninjago #2026 #2011 #15 by @citysoncreation

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10 months ago

WOAH early reveal for the first time! Still it didn't really feel much less of a wait as I have been waiting to talk about this set for 2 years! I feel like the blacksmith shop has been on the "maybe" list every year since I joined the company (not sure if it was ever before that 🤔), at one point I started worrying if we will ever make it even for the 15th anniversary! So I took it to my hands and spent a week of down time in the office, and made a sketch model for it to sell the idea to my boss and the marketing team in 2023, and that went pretty well! The model went on to be the first thing we locked in for the 2026 lineup and it stayed there all the way 😊

I have never been so anxious about the launch of a set, because I know how much it means to the fans... The amount of times I have rewatched every scene this building showed up in the show frame by frame, I can't even count, and down to the last minute I was still debating the colour of the phone on the wall haha 🤣

I'm also really happy with the size and price point we ended up with... I know some of you may think this model looks tiny for the piece count, but I promise you it's been optimized to the core! It's just a dense and detailed model. When I opened up my sketch model file to start finalizing it, I was waaay overpriced and at the time I even only had Wu, Kai and Nya in the file, so much so that marketing asked if I can live with half a house for the price 😬 So I'm incredibly proud when I arrived at the final build that has the exact same footprint for the shop, with 3 extra figures and a display stand - I guarantee you no money was wasted in this build!

I can write on forever about this model but I guess I will save some for the eventual write-ups. I would like to end on this wonderful story: I actually got the chance to present this model to the one and only @vincent_tong_007 earlier this year when he visited us at the office... I was 12 when I was watching the pilot episodes on TV, and I would never have imagined the day when I hear Kai himself thanking me for bringing his family house to life as an official LEGO product 🥲 Simply remarkable...

#lego #ninjago #2026 #2011 #blacksmith by @citysoncreation

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a year ago

A bit late to the party, but I have always wanted to do a drawing for the super sick design of Monstrosity Kai! 🔥 With NINJAGO Legends: Duskfall coming out later this year though, maybe it's still a good time to do a callback to last year's Monstrosity before the next Legendary chapter begins? 👀

P.S. Once again could not pick between the normal white background or black version so I'm posting both 🤷‍♂️

#lego #ninjago #legends #monstrosity #kai by @citysoncreation

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a month ago

So turns out there is another model I worked on for 2026 that I almost forgot about! 951466 Kai with Motorcycle would be my 23rd model, and as the set name conclusively describes, it is Kai, with his Motorcycle 😌

This was a fun little side task - the brief was to build a motorcycle for Kai, so I came up with a motorcycle for Kai, driven by Kai, on his motorcycle. I actually took some inspiration from another motorcycle, 71838 Kai's Motorcycle Speed Race that came out last year, so if you have built Kai's Motorcycle in that set, you may find some similarity in this motorcycle in "Kai with Motorcycle", but I also tried my best to give it some personality with the flames piece on the side of the motorcycle, to fit the Kai who is driving this motorcycle 🏍

One interesting fact is that because all these have to fit inside the tin box, I was actually given a limit on number of pieces on top of the budget, which is not a usual restriction we would have! I think the packaging turns out wayyyy cooler than anything I could've expected! At the moment it seems to be an exclusive item in the German store Edeka, so I'm not even sure if I would be able to get one myself 🥲 but I hope some German NINJAGO fans will get to have fun with this little model - the tin box also comes with a bunch of playing cards and such! 🥷

#lego #ninjago #2026 #kai #motorbike by @citysoncreation

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a month ago

It's been a long while since I have drawn anything! It's always very difficult to start something again once I pause for a while, as I would start questioning whether I still know how to do it 🥲 I decided to start off easy with just one figure and I thought the CMF Lloyd on my table would be a good pick. Pretty happy how it turned out! Maybe I should draw a few more versions of Lloyd to make it a collection? 🤔💚

#ninjago #lego #fanart #lloyd #green by @citysoncreation

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3 months ago

Part 14 - Epilogue

This is it, the end to the 2-week long series of me babbling through the development, my thinking, fun facts and cool shots of the Twin Titan Mechs! I hope you guys enjoy my daily word salad and perhaps along the way come to appreciate the model a bit more after learning all the little stories behind them, or just by seeing all the cool poses they can do (please promise me not to just stand them in a boring way if you have them on your shelf 🥺)

I end on this epic shot of all 6 of our ninja Titan Mechs in the series - it's truly a dream come true for me to see them all together like that, and even more so to be able to work on the final two 🤯 Will there be more of them? Who knows - like the Legends ads said, "only time will tell"... but for now at least we can appreciate the fact that we get one for each of the OG 6 😌

I will try and see if I can find the time to do another write-up series on the Old Town later this year, hopefully bridging the gap between now and the day I can talk about all the cool stuff I worked on for 2027 😬 (such a long wait! 🥲) Until then, thanks again for spending the time to read all my babbling and let me know in the comments if there's any remaining mystery for you regarding the Twins, I will try to answer them with whatever I can share haha 👀

#lego #ninjago by @citysoncreation

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4 months ago

Part 13 - Gear Swap

As mentioned in a previous part, at some point I was asked to explore the possibility of including multiple extra gears for the mechs to be customize, and since I do not want to sacrifice the size/details on the mechs by spending money on anything extra, I counter-proposed to my manager - what if it's more like a "part-swapping" kind of customization? In my head that makes perfect sense narratively for a twin unit to swap gears in battle to help each other out, and that way I get to still just build one set of gears per mech, which also avoid having a bunch of loose weapons/accessories lying around when you are done with the build, as I personally find that rather annoying haha

Of course there is more than just the arms and the back attachment that you can swap, because the connection points of essentially every segment of these two mechs are the same, so theoretically you can swap any part you want around... but most of them would just look like a mess haha 🤪 In order to make sense of the swapping, I also decided to colourcode the parts that are designed to be swapped in white and gold, such that there won't be any blue on the red mech or vice versa when you swap the gears. This decision actually in turn helped me a bit with cleaning up the colour blocking too😌

I cannot emphasize enough this is BY NO MEANS any implication to what will happen in Duskfall (you will just have to wait and see 👀) - but my PERSONAL head-canon is that when you swap the gears, you get the version that Jin and Mira pilot, whereas the original configuration is when Kai and Nya pilot them. I'm glad that got realized at least on the packaging, which I think also gave the gear swap an extra layer of purpose with the two sets of characters you can choose from! ✌️

#lego #ninjago by @citysoncreation

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4 months ago

Part 12 - The Stand

What you are looking at here is probably the most challenging part of the set to design, and I'm not joking! When I first had the concept of the Twin Titan Mechs, I had the vision of one of them in the air and the other on the ground, so I threw together a display stand for my concept model, not thinking much of it. Of course that turned out to be the highlight for many people, after seeing how much potential for extra poses the stand gives - and the next thing I know I was told that the stand has to be in the set despite already being a stretch to include two Titan Mechs for 140 🙃

So when it was finalizing time, I actually spent a lot of time investigating what's the cheapest yet most elegant way to construct the stand, and there were weeks of me just coming up with a different stand every single day. We also did a lot of test on the stability because the mechs, while not as big as Cole or Lloyd's, are still considerably heavy. It was a fine line to bring enough support while not overengineering it into a Technic mess. On top of that, I also had to make sure that the stand fits within one bag (the size of it is not big enough to justify 2), but that also meant that you get a massive bag of mostly just black and dark grey elements, which is never ideal... A lot of thoughts were put into making sure that the elements used in the stand are optimized in terms of variety and ease to distinguish, I'm really happy that I even managed to cover up most of the Technic holes on the Technjc bricks in the final design. It's a minor detail but I do think it made the stand look much more polished 😌

I also thought it could be nice to double the display stand as a stand for the minifigures, especially given the poor Oni would otherwise just be on its own facing two Titan Mechs 😆 One detail that may not be obvious to everyone, is that there are two holes behind where the minifigs stand for their weapons storage when they are in the mech - yes I have yet again failed to find a spot for them on the mech haha, but at least there is that 🥲 Next time... I hope on my next mech I will finally be able to include a weapon holder! 💪🥷

#lego #ninjago by @citysoncreation

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4 months ago

Part 11 - The Blue Couple

Many of you have pointed out the similarity of Nya's Titan Mech to Jay's, and yes, that was very much an intentional choice! 😁 As a big fan of Jaya as a couple, I'd like to think the two of them would also go on a mission by themselves, and while I couldn't go back in time to change history such that Kai's Titan Mech was released as Core instead and I can make Jaya's mechs as the Twin Titan Mechs, I thought it would still be a cool idea to give them some visual cues that tie the two together, such that if you want, you can display the Blue Couple together on shelf 💙💙

Both of them follows a skinny mech aesthetics, but I also tried to bring a bit more elegance to the shaping and stance on Nya's. I also wanted the pointy cockpit as a shared feature, but then again I tried to do it in a different way so that it doesn't feel like a 1:1 copy. The spinner crown pieces are also used on both Jay's shoulder cannons and Nya's jet boosters to make them feel like they could be a unit. I know some people feel like they are too similar for their own good, but personally I'm pretty happy with the level of similarity and difference I landed on between these two, and I hope the explanation may make you give it a chance for a second look and see it differently - but if not, that's perfectly fine too haha, but at least now you know it was an intentional choice and not just because we are running out of ideas for blue mechs 😝

I originally considered giving Nya's mech the 01 on sticker, because of the 00 on Jay's arm, but in the end I feel like it might be a bit of an overthinking given how vague and abstract the 00 was on Jay's, and then within the Twin Titan Mechs set itself, it makes much more sense that Kai gets 01 being the big brother that was born first - just another pointless fun facts from development haha 😺

#lego #ninjago by @citysoncreation

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4 months ago

Part 10 - Aero Booster

Some of you have been asking me if the Twin Mechs were inspired by the Exo-Force Golden City mechs, and my answer has always been no, because... well, they weren't haha, the similarities in colour schemes were pure coincidence (as I have explained how I arrived in the colour schemes in previous posts) 😝 That said, there is actually a part of it that is somewhat inspired by an Exo-Force Golden City set, and that is the jet booster on Nya.

In my original sketch I actually had the massive cannon on Nya's, and a pair of tiny boosters on the Kai one, again just to sell the idea of a Twin Mech with different accessories to marketing. When it was finalizing time, I think it actually makes way more sense to switch them around given the roles I have assigned for them. I was not convinced by the tiny boosters in the original sketch and wanted something with more visual punch, which brought me to looking at probably one of if not my favourite Exo-Force set 8106 Areo Booster! That set is a masterpiece of creating visual impact with efficient part usage, and it was what inspired me to use those Technic panels as fins to create a visually large but light structure that the mech can reasonably carry - I was really happy with the effect! 😊

My favourite thing about this build, was actually how you can also pose the booster units differently for some extra modes. In my head-canon, you can either fold them forward as a shield when the mech is underfire, or you can also flip them over and use the jet boosters as your last resort fire power - or maybe just to quickly glide backwards to dodge an attack? When not in used, the two boosters can also be folded backwards and form this nice shell-like shape on the back. They are just so much fun to pose around with!

One last detail I want to mention was about the stickers. I specifically asked Renato to keep the stickers just small ones along the edge, so that you won't have to apply 6 massive stickers by the end of the build and ruin the overall experience. I suggested to do these harzard line/warning text stickers, and hopefully some mech MOCers will find them useful!😁

#lego #ninjago by @citysoncreation

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4 months ago

Part 9 - Nya's Titan Mech

Let me start by addressing the elephant in the room - the colour scheme. If I'm honest, I was completely taken by surprise for how controversial the colour scheme turned out to be in the fandom, because as a Nya fan myself I never found the dark blue to be an "odd" choice so to speak 😬 It's not the first time she is associated with the dark blue, both of her water dragons has had dark blue and so is her NRG minifigure. Sure, dark azure or titanium is far more commonly used for her, but if you look at Lloyd and Zane's Titan Mechs, they both used what I considered an "off-shade" version of their colours (sand green and sand blue) that are also not the most commonly associated with the ninja - the dark blue follows the same colour scheme logic in my opinion.

That said, I did try with dark azure and titanium at some point during development, but I have quickly turned down both options - the dark azure doesn't pair well with the white, as it makes the mech looks way too bright and down-in-age to me, it simply doesn't fit in the aesthetics of the Legends subtheme nor the overall Titan lineups, and the titanium with white just make it a greyscale mech essentially, which also feels off when you look at the lineup as a whole. The dark blue also pairs the best with the dark red on Kai's, so while you may not agree with the choice, I stand by my decision haha - and in the end of the day, it's a LEGO model, if you want it to be dark azure, you can try to colour swap it into dark azure maybe? 💙

Since I had her on the stand for most pictures in the previous posts, I tried to focus on getting some cool poses out of her without the stand here. I tried to keep the mech slim and agile as a contrast to Kai, and I'm pretty happy with how the final result looks 😊 I'm particularly happy with the angled panels around the hips, they fit so nicely around the joints but also easily move out of the way when you want to pose the legs. She looks pretty close to my very first original sketch model, the biggest change that happened during finalization was actually her back boosters, which I will talk about in tomorrow's post - so stay tuned! 👀

#lego #ninjago by @citysoncreation

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4 months ago