Will this be the first in a long string of creations? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I recently contacted Mike Psiaki about redoing my favourite childhood set 6357 in a modern and detailed form. He agreed and after much conversation, sharing of photos and work this is the result. The helicopter was mostly made by Mike and the truck by me but both were discussed at length to get them looking as good as we could manage. The trailer was a true combined effort with each of us contributing many ideas.

Although Mike has been more busy building than me.

Griffon brings an excellent rendition of 6080 LEGOLand Castle, originally released in 1984:

It even opens up, just like the original! Check out the rest of the photos on Brickshelf.

You can see the original gallery here.

Worth checking out the other photos of The Meeting for more detailed pictures of this creation as well as several others.

Although he actually completed it last year, Bryan recently announced the completion of a project that he had been working on for quite some time, namely his Classic Crusader Giant Fig and Horse. I thought this would be a good opportunity to pick his brain and share with our readers some of the “behind-the-scenes” information on this creation.

TBB: How long have you been working on your knight and horse?

Bryan: I probably started on the knight and horse back in June of 2006, completing the knight a month later in July. I really dragged out the construction of the horse and finished it in March of 2008 just before the birth of my son. If you add up all the time I actually worked on them, it probably comes out to 3 weeks worth of evenings, for roughly 40 hours?

TBB: People always ask how many bricks are in a MOC like this. Do you have any idea and do you care?

Bryan: I have no idea. Maybe 5000 bricks for the horse and 3500 for the knight? It doesn’t concern me much since there aren’t very many extremely rare pieces in this MOC apart from all that old dark grey.

TBB: Why did you choose to build a Crusader?

Bryan: Although my first castle set was the yellow castle, my favorite castle set was 6080. I went into my dark ages right before the Crusaders sets came out, and after I rediscovered LEGO back in 1997, I realized that the armor piece was so cool. So I’d say Lion Knights and the Crusaders are now my all-time favorite faction.

TBB: I’ve seen other figs in the this scale but I can’t remember ever seeing the armor before. Are you the first to do that?

Bryan: Yes, I think I’m the first person to have such a large rendition of the breastplate armor with leg protection in ABS plastic.

TBB: What was the most difficult aspect of this MOC?

Bryan: The most difficult part of this MOC was the grill on his helmet. The helmet itself is based heavily on the green hat from the official 3723 LEGO mini-figure set, but I had to design the grill by trial and error. What made it especially challenging is the fact that the helmet is 16 studs wide, but the grill is 17, so I had to use a combination of 1×1 tiles and 1×2 plates with 1 stud to make it work. I remember first building flimsy mockups of the grill, and after I had a design I was satisfied with, I had to make a copy of it with structurally sound building techniques (i.e. “overlap technique”). Finally, I built the helmet around the grill.

TBB: Who or what inspired you as you worked on this?

Bryan: Bruce N H from Classic-Castle first brought my attention to a giant Black Falcon minifig on a horse back in January of 2006. Seeing a giant castle-themed fig was cool, but seeing one on horseback really put it over the top: I had to have one of my own.

TBB: I saw that you have acknowledged or thanked several people in your post. Can you elaborate on how they helped you out?

Bryan: Of course there’s Tobias Reichling, who inspired me to build this. He took numerous pictures of his horse for me and they were extremely useful when building the head section. I also got a lot of help from Peer Kreuger, who came up with a method of creating blueprints for mosaics in Photoshop. He provided me with the building plans for the shield, and I would have never been able to pull off the “rampant lion” if it weren’t for Peer. Finally, I also need to thank Jojo for getting me in touch with Tobias.

TBB: If you were to start over, what would you do differently?

Bryan: Now that I think about it, I should have built a helmet with pointed visor instead. I just realized that there exists no minifig with this color helmet and armor combo…

TBB: What do people say when they see this in your house?

Bryan: Not many people have actually seen this – those that have are generally impressed with it, especially the shield. My parents commented “You still have time for LEGO?” and I had to remind them that this was before I became a dad.

TBB: Are you going to keep it together?

Bryan: I’m a huge fan of LEGO sculptures, so I’m definitely going to keep this together.

TBB: What’s next on the horizon for you, Lego-wise?

Bryan: I’ve built “large” castles as a kid/teenager, but now as an adult, with a much larger collection, I’d like to build a large, detailed castle of course. However, with a 15-month old son running around, that’s not going to happen any time soon, so I’ll settle for something much simpler. I’ll try and find some time to put together my copy of 10193 Medieval Market Village, and hopefully learn some new building techniques in the process.

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us, Bryan!

So I was absolutely ecstatic to see that Robert VH (flickr and MOCpages) had built The Spearhead, a spaceship that appeared in the 1986 LEGO comic story “Jim Spaceborn.”

During my “dark ages,” I did a pretty good job of preserving most of my bricks and instructions, but I regrettably let the catalogs and idea books go. Luckily, I have friends who have plenty of extras. Reliving those memories and garnering inspiration from those classic documents can be a refreshing addition to building.

His lovely wife, Katie, built this cool mosaic of their wedding.

She displayed it at BrickCon 2007, but I don’t think we ever blogged it.

Mike Stimpson’s (balakov) interpretation of the classic photo by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press seems quite timely to feature today though he made it some time ago. Twenty years after Tiananmen Square and my understanding is that due to the press blackout on this image in mainland China, it has not been seen by over a billion people in the People’s Republic.

I very briefly considered posting this as only an image with link to Mike’s original posting on flickr (for graphic punch), but I found that at least 3 flickr users had swiped the image without giving proper credit and I didn’t want to add to that number. It became my introduction to the brick-busters group on flickr. Sad.

By the way, Tony is featured in the newest issue of Railbricks. I believe this is their first-ever Steam edition…

Via The Living Brick, Ochre Jelly’s new LEGO sculpture blog.

Adrian Drake (Brickfrenzy) has been posting pictures of older creations on Flickr lately, and my favorite so far is his turkey mecha:

Click the picture for Adrian’s history of this creation, and check out the gallery on brickfrenzy.com for more pictures, including shots of the turkey with all weapons deployed.

Oh, and a belated “Happy Thanksgiving!” from me, too. ;-)

Check out the entire gallery.