This alien landscape of a cavernous marshland by Raoul Baldwin features many exotic elements. There are so many aspects of this creation I like, including the color texturing with olive green and dark tan, the vertical raised dark tan baseplate, the rocks in the foreground to add perspective and depth, and the integration of elements of technology and nature. Don’t forget to check out the details of the organic looking alien walker.
I fell in love with Calin’s superb MaK SAFS as soon as he posted them, but while they are an uncannily accurate reproduction of the rounded source material they lacked that sense of excessive viciousness that I love so much.
So, having adopted the core of his model with some small changes, I incorporated spindly arms and digitigrade legs to get something much more sinister. Add in some boilerplate creepy backstory and a name from Native American mythology and voila, you’ve got a monstrous mech and six of his dearest friends.
“How’s it feel to be on the front page of every newspaper in the English-speaking world, even though the other side denies the incident?” Top Gun is so cheesy, it’s like mature cheddar wrapped in a slice of Emmental with some Parmesan sprinkled on top. Yet, when I first saw the movie as a teenager, I loved it. Not for the actors and certainly not for the scenes of sweaty fighter pilots playing volleyball, mind you, but because of the true star of the movie: the wonderful Grumman F-14 Tomcat. I have been a Tomcat fan ever since and have had at least one LEGO model of a Tomcat for at least 20 years.
I have been thinking about building a larger scale aircraft for about two years now. Seeing the excellent 1/18 F-16 by Everblack a few weeks ago, in combination with my ongoing movie vehicle project prompted me to finally have a go. If I was going to bite the bullet, it would have to be a Tomcat and it would have to be the one from Top Gun, cheesy or not.
The process was relatively painless. Building an aircraft at a different scale was interesting. Some of the solutions that I’m used to didn’t really work, so I had to be a bit more inventive. However, the larger scale does have advantages. I had a lot more room to work with, which meant I could incorporate a lot of techniques that I normally don’t have room for. It is 108 studs long, excluding the nose probe, and with the wings in their most forward position has a wingspan of 110 studs. This isn’t small by any means, but it’s also not quite so large that I had to worry too much about structural issues.
I know that there are some readers out there who are of the opinion that I do blog rather many of my own models and, admittedly, I have blogged a fair few. I build a lot more than the ones I blog though and, be honest, do you think the other guys wouldn’t have blogged this if I weren’t one of the contributors?
I must say this piece of junk by j¤nesy is fantastic:
I’ve actually tried to build one before, but even 4 times as big as j¤nesy’s, I wasn’t able to recreate the distinctive elegance that he has managed to capture with this creation. The use of the old Ninja Sails is nothing short of an epic technique. But it doesn’t stop there – the little details of the rolled up silks in the boat and the fantastic rolling waters just adds the this already amazing build.
The team behind the incredibly successful Mobile Frame Zero is at it again, this time bringing microscale battles into the void of space.
The original game spawned an entire subcommunity around the competing factions of mecha and has brought a number of new builders into the AFOL community through the fusion of Lego, wargaming, and the timeless appeal of giant robots smashing into each other.
Check out the kickstarter here!
For your second tasty morsel of steampunkery today, feast upon Eric Druon’s (BaronSat) armored skyboat. It employs a brick-built hull, and the age-old technique of employing exposed studs as rivets looks particularly good on this machine.
Who doesn’t love a sleek steampunk flying machine, resplendent with leather wings and giant wooden propellers? This snappy gyrocopter by Dwalin Forkbeard is a fine example of just such a craft, and needs only a pastoral floating rock berth to be the quintessential go-to of steampunkery.
Your minifigs might or might not be under the influence of certain substances if they encounter this castle, but just ignore that and admire the lovely bricks in Simon Schweyer’s rainbow fortress.
After Tyler posted an anti-frog build, A Plastic Infinity decided to show us Frogs are smarter than the average bot, with this amusing build:
While it was definitely the humour that caught my eye (not to mention the cute little frog), there are actually a lot of fantastic build techniques he’s used in the bot itself. From the brilliantly illegal shoulder joint connections, to the marvelous finger connection – this bot just fantastic.
The drone bandwagon keeps rolling, with the past week seeing a number of particularly nice examples of the genre.
Paul Meissner (legosamurai) pays homage to the artist that launched a thousand drones with this superbly accurate reproduction of a well-known piece of concept art by StTheo. And be sure to check out the rugged tactical variant, too.
Michael Wilhoit (MijeW) continues his trend of funky drone designs with unpronounceable names with this derpy-faced and spindly-armed design;
Xavier Fernandez (Bezor-1) finally takes a half decent photo of his excellent mecha builds with this elegant design. The minimalist color scheme makes the turquoise katana look all the better.
