This is my submission to an official contest held on LEGO Ideas for classic Walt Disney animations: a sculpture of the iconic maniacal Mad Hatter as seen in my favorite Walt Disney classic animation Alice in Wonderland! Growing up as a kid, Alice in Wonderland was my personal favorite Disney cartoon that I watched often with my sister.

This sculpture ended up being larger and more of a challenge than expected. I planned on making it about half the size as it currently is, to make a sort of bobble character. I kept on piling on pieces to the point of making the face and overall head very big. The first part I built was the bulk of the hat, which was rather difficult and uses an irregular building method of slopes and wedges chained together with hinges, in a SNOT (Studs Not On Top) pattern.

The mouth and face structure had a lot of revisions too, and the hair added a lot of extra weight which created some stability issues. The eyes were the last part built, and originally were much larger but seemed too much like googly eyes. Surprisingly, the 10/6 hat label was a lot simpler than I expected; it’s a basic design I came up with towards the end when I was finalizing the sculpture. I decided to use physical pieces for the label rather than printing a sticker like in previous builds.