Yearly Archives: 2018

The Brothers Brick to safeguard all LEGO creations featured since 2005 in response to Flickr’s changes to free accounts [News]

Early last month, we noted how changes to Flickr’s free accounts have the potential to significantly harm the historical record of the LEGO hobbyist (AFOL) community. Historically, Flickr provided unlimited storage to its Free account users, but the number of photos that can be hosted on a Free account will be limited to 1,000 starting January 1st, 2019. As a result, many LEGO creations hosted in Free accounts are now at risk of disappearing forever. This is particularly heartbreaking for photos from LEGO builders who have passed away or are no longer participating in the hobbyist community. But we have good news to share, so please read on!

Read more about what TBB is doing to help ensure continuity in the LEGO building community

This incredible custom LEGO Flying Dutchman from the Pirates of the Caribbean is over 3 feet long

After six years in the making, master shipbuilder Sebeus I has completed his sensational LEGO version of the Flying Dutchman. The 3-foot-long ship has been fittingly constructed from a muted palette of grey, dark tan, and sand green bricks, giving it the perfect spectral hue. It also allows for an amazing amount of detail to be packed into the vessel’s decaying hull.

Flying Dutchman

The tattered sails and rigging are particularly well realised, looking most effective as she glides out of the gloom.  Sebeus’s photoshop skills enhancing the atmosphere to good effect.Flying Dutchman

Click to see more of the amazing Flying Dutchman

Top 10 most popular LEGO creations featured on The Brothers Brick in 2018

The Brothers Brick featured nearly 1,500 LEGO creations in 2018, ranging from unique characters to recreations of iconic vehicles and scenes from movies like Star Wars and Harry Potter. We recently shared our short-list for the best LEGO creations of 2018. But what custom creations we’ve featured were the most popular with you, our readers? Let’s take a look at the top 10 most popular LEGO models highlighted over this past year.

See the full list of the 10 most popular LEGO creations on TBB this year

Impressive LEGO version of Star-Wars AT-Hauler

The theft of an Imperial AT-Hauler spacecraft forms a key part of the events of Solo: A Star Wars Story. The AT-Hauler is an interesting design, with rotating lift-arms the key feature, designed to carry and deploy the Empire’s fearsome AT-AT Walkers. skeptical.bricks spent six months designing and building a screen-accurate LEGO model of the ship, and the end result is a beauty. The large-scale model perfectly captures the shape of the spacecraft, and whilst it’s very grey, the somewhat drab colour scheme is faithful to the source material, and the mix of plate and tile cladding certainly recreates the feel of armour plating.

LEGO Star Wars Solo Spaceship

Click through to see more pictures of this impressive Star Wars creation

Two-seater space speeder is a classic

What’s Benny the Spaceman so pleased about? Maybe the arrival of the brilliant 70841 Benny’s Space Squad set? Or, just as likely, he’s absolutely stoked at the cool space speeder captainsmog has built for him. This is Classic Space building at its best — a spot-on colour scheme, a depth of greebly detailing, and a huge sense of fun. The ranks of angled clips along the sides at the front are a smart choice, their textured sections provide a touch of tiny detail which make this look more realistic. (Or at least as realistic as anything can be in outer space where helmets don’t need visors!)

LEGO Spaceman Benny Speeder

An office with a view

Whatever people may think about Darth Vader’s regime, there’s no doubting his taste for classy work spaces. Whether he’s working from his head office or on a business trip to a distant system, the interior and the views he and his staff enjoy are to be envied. Brick Ninja perfectly captures his excellent model of the Imperial Super Star Destroyer Executor, so perfect it looks almost exactly like a shot from The Empire Strikes Back.

Executor Bridge

And it’s not just a pretty-looking diorama, but a proper copy of the ship’s bridge. While the front of the bridge is for admiring the fleet, there are some important business meetings happening on its other side.

No Discintegrations

The 10 most popular custom LEGO creation instructions on The Brothers Brick for 2018 [Instructions]

LEGO bricks are amazing little parts that can bring to life almost anything you can imagine. There are many reasons to build — some people do it to relax, some to impress, and some are artists who love to sculpt with bricks as a medium. Regardless of the reasons, we can all agree that for those of us that just prefer to follow instructions, it can be delightful to still have a chance to build a few of these custom creations. For the designers, creating instructions is an effort that needs to be commended, as it a great deal of takes time and patience. Today, we’re recognizing some of the builders who shared instructions of their fantastic creations that were most popular in 2018 with readers of The Brothers Brick.

LEGO instructions on TBB

Click to see the Top 10 Custom builds with Instructions

Princess Monoblock protects the forest

The blocky Brickheadz building style meets classic Japanese anime in this cubist LEGO rendition of San from Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke. Immediately recognisable to fans of the movie, Nathan DeCastro‘s model captures all the essential elements of the famous character. Those streaks of red makeup are perfect, tapering to a point thanks to the use of curved 1×1 tiles, and the white fur headdress and the necklace are excellent. Now all this needs is a giant wolf built to the appropriate scale!

LEGO Studio Ghibli

Beware the dangerous depths of Layers City

With sets like 70620 Ninjago City and 70657 Ninjago City Docks, The LEGO Ninjago Movie brought a cyber-punk aesthetic to official LEGO sets, which in cool factor is only eclipsed by the post-apocalyptic aesthetic of the new LEGO sets from The LEGO Movie 2. While LEGO fans have certainly been building cyberpunk creations for many years, even more builders have embraced this aesthetic, inspiring numerous custom LEGO models, including our own Ninjago City collaborative display at BrickCon, featuring over 60 custom city blocks. Sebastian Bachórzewski is an incredibly talented builder who builds in everything from medieval to post-apoc style. His latest large-scale model is “Layers City,” featuring a slice cut from a teeming metropolis full of colorful characters.

Layers City

Take a closer look at Layers City

A small reflection of life as it is

We often build with LEGO bricks to imitate, in other words reflect, life. While Ralf Langer‘s latest creation is a completely realistic microscale depiction of medieval life, the word reflection has more meanings to it.

Time to reflect

First we see a micro mountain village with some cool techniques like the church roof, printed tiles as windows and modified plates as pine trees, but then something interesting in the water catches the eye. Ralf states in the picture description on Flickr that this is an experiment in water reflections, and I can see where he is going with it. A little extra bit is exposed in the description; if you go to the beginning of Ralf’s Flickr photostream, you can see that the building being reflected in the water is a microscale version of his first custom LEGO creation, earlier this year.

Top 10 most popular LEGO set reviews of 2018 on The Brothers Brick [Reviews]

In 2018, the team at The Brothers Brick reviewed over 120 LEGO sets. For Collectible Minifigures, we’ll remember this year as the year that LEGO introduced “chaser” minifigures – having only one special figure in a box of 60. From the Technic range, the largest set ever was unleashed. In the classic System theme, the largest set this year trumps nearly all other sets that came before, coming in as the second-largest set of all time, just behind the UCS Millennium Falcon. LEGO IDEAS made headlines yet again this year, proving that LEGO has a winning theme on their hands, but only 2 of them made it into the Top 10 out of the four released.

Curious to find out which ones made it? Which Technic sets made the cut? How well did the Collectible Minifigures do? Dive right in as we take a moment to look at the Top 10 most popular reviews featured on The Brothers Brick website.

Dive right in to see the Top 10 Reviews of 2018

Rorschach test in LEGO bricks

While these strange shapes don’t look anything like inkblots, they’re as good as any Rorschach test to me. It’s titled “Rot” by builder Sheo, and it’s an enigmatic scene to test our visual perception of what we see. If had to guess, I’d say that it’s partial skeletal remains of an alien lying in decay in a faraway galaxy. I can’t say for sure what the balloon-like piece depicts but I can say it’s an ingenious use of parts with LEGO rubber tires held together by mechanical arms that we frequently see on droid figures.

Rot