Yearly Archives: 2020

Rock, papercuts, scissors, wait...

The players of the game that settles it all can get a little carried away sometimes. In this cute LEGO vignette by Pedro Sequeira some of our favorite players; rock, paper, and scissors are brought to life in three dimensions and we can see the consequences of such rough play!

Each player – rock, paper, and scissors are made up of some pretty standard small elements such as slopes, tiles, and small bricks. The faces on the objects and their expressions are what make this scene both adorable and hilarious. The rock and paper characters feature woodoo balls with eye prints, while printed round 1×1 tiles with mischievous squinting eyes decorate the face of scissors. A stream of tears on poor cut-up paper’s face is cleverly rendered with a couple translucent clear dragon’s fire elements. I enjoy the lines on the paper created with grey plates to give it that loose-leaf paper aesthetic. Maybe rock can talk some sense into scissors while poor paper heals its wounds from battle. Sequeira does mention that this brick-built vignette is based off of an illustration which can be viewed here.

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LEGO 77906 Wonder Woman and the Cheetah now available for pre-orders [Sales]

The LEGO 77906 Wonder Woman and the Cheetah Fandom reveal earlier today is now available for pre-order on LEGO Online Store (US Only). It is priced at $39.99 USD and will ship on October 1st. The set comes with 3 minifigures and 255 pieces. We are also extremely proud to note that this is first LEGO set designed by former TBB Contributor Carter Baldwin in his new role as LEGO product designer.

Click here to pre-order the set now and read the full details of the reveal here

TBB Weekly Brick Report: LEGO news roundup for August 22, 2020

In addition to the amazing LEGO models created by builders all over the world, The Brothers Brick brings you the best of LEGO news and reviews. This is our weekly Brick Report for the third week of August 2020.

We create LEGO art with the new Iron Man mosaic set. Keep reading our Brick Report to get all the details.

TBB NEWS, REVIEWS AND INSTRUCTIONS: This week we got a backstage look at the Lego Instructions For Every Day Life series, saw the reveal of the new Harry Potter collectible minifigures, learned to make a tiny NES and more.

The LEGO Foundation expands Braille Bricks availability to aid visually impaired learning – LEGO Braille Bricks have officially launched, providing an interactive learning tool for both the visually impaired and their sighted peers.
LEGO Art 31199 Marvel Studios Iron Man mosaic + 7,000-piece Ultimate Build [Review] – We’re going hands-on in this review with the new LEGO Art 31199 Marvel Studios Iron Man mosaic, including the Ultimate Build that uses over 7,000 pieces!
Build your own microscale Nintendo Entertainment System [Instructions] – Thomas Gion has you covered if you love the new LEGO NES set, but don’t have the budget.

MORE TBB NEWS & FEATURES:

Behind the scenes: How the instructions for your everyday life in LEGO were made [Feature] – We go behind the scenes and interview Primus Nair, Head of Creative of Asia Pacific from LEGO to find how the team pulled the LEGO Life Instructions together.
LEGO’s next book will be “The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks” – What secrets are LEGO bricks hiding? You can find out when LEGO’s next book for adult fans is published.
The new LEGO 71028 Harry Potter Collectible Minifigures Series 2 revealed – The second series of the Harry Potter Collectible Minifigures have been revealed.
LEGO 60271 City Main Square with characters from LEGO City Adventures TV show revealed – A new LEGO City set featuring a town hall building, a limousine, a classic diner and a city park with a concert platform and new trackless tram as been revealed.

OTHER NEWS: There were quite a few other interesting LEGO news articles from around the web this week. Here are the best of the rest:

Legoland’s upcoming New York park has an attraction that makes riders feel like they’ve shrunk down to the size of a Lego brick, Insider – The Lego Factory Adventure ride will make riders feel like they’ve been shrunken down to the size of a Lego brick.
Adidas x Lego Sneakers Dropping This Fall, Complex – Adidas will soon launch a collaborative project with Lego.
Patent Filings Roundup: AI Inventor Facial Challenge Filed; Lego and WB Challenge RFID Toy Patents; Uniloc Challenge Denied for Indefiniteness (Sort Of ), IP watchdog – The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), for its part, saw 36 patent filings, driven up in part by a half-dozen petitions from LEGO® and Warner Bros. against assertion vehicle MQ Gaming, LLC.
Lego piece falls out of New Zealand boy’s nose after being stuck for two years, The Guardian – Sameer Anwar’s parents thought the lost piece of Lego was long gone – until their son took a great big sniff of a plate of cupcakes

LEGO 77906 Wonder Woman and the Cheetah revealed as DC Fandome Exclusive [News]

As the DC Fandome event is only hours away from opening its virtual doors, we get a peek at yet another exclusive – this time featuring Wonder Woman, the Cheetah and Etta Candy. It comes with 3 minifigures made up of 255 pieces in total and a vignette of Cheetah wielding a sword in a mid-flight pounce attacking Wonder Woman.

Click for a closer look

LEGO Supergirl Exclusive Minifigure to be released at DC FanDome event as a giveaway [News]

The upcoming DC FanDome event has announced that a new LEGO Exclusive Supergirl Minifigure will be given away during the online experience. A total of 1,495 figures will be part of the sweepstakes. This version of the Supergirl minifigure is inspired by the CW DC Comics Television Series Supergirl featuring Melissa Benoist in the lead role as Kara Zor-El.

Click to find out more about the event and giveaway details

Now those are some happy trees

Most artists I know are usually intimidated by a blank canvas. That doesn’t seem to bother this painter adding color to an otherwise monochrome landscape, by Carter Witz. By choosing to make most of the landscape unpainted, Carter is able to use some great LEGO parts that come in limited colors, like teeth, claws, and horns, and even a few skeleton arms. Plus, as a bonus, the green frog serves as a large paint blob spilling out of the bucket. It’s a happy accident that Bob Ross would be proud of.

RuinScape

The ruinous landscape – a popular pictorial theme is recreated in the LEGO medium here in this beautiful vignette by Jaap Bijl. Of course, LEGO is great for construction, but even more so LEGO can provide builders with an opportunity to be forces of deconstruction and deterioration – creators of ruin. This sublime energy is perfectly captured in Bijl’s build.

The main part of this built scene is arguably the decaying classical temple. The triangular roof at the top – the pediment is depicted as half existent and utilizes the 4×4 petaled flower piece and some white wing pieces as ornament. The broken columns are built using 2×2 round profile bricks. Perhaps my favorite mini-build here is the broken statue which is made out of a pair of white minifigure legs with some random elements piled on top. The statue on the left looks rather intact but creatively uses the 4×4 petaled flower once again, this time as a shield. Bijl generously applies a variety of LEGO plant elements to give viewers a sense of natural reclamation. I really appreciate how Bijl builds the ruins in such a way that they appear to be sinking into a swamp of green tiles. No ruinous destination is complete without some tourists taking in the sights, and we can see here some minifigures making their way across the swamp in a brick-built boat ready for adventure.

LEGO Art 31199 Marvel Studios Iron Man mosaic + 7,000-piece Ultimate Build [Review]

A few months ago we reported that LEGO was discontinuing its Creator Expert branding in favor of a broader array of adult-targeted LEGO sets. There’s no longer a handy moniker to round up these sets, but most of them bear the new 18+ age recommendation, which simply denotes their focus on adults rather than signifying anything about the difficulty of the set, as the age bracket has traditionally done. However, most of the sets that have come out of the new initiative fall neatly within the familiar styles from previous years, such as the Star Wars UCS A-wing, Crocodile Locomotive, or the Haunted House. One new assortment stands out, though, with the LEGO Art line featuring a series of four sets that let you assemble your own wall decor mosaic-style. Today we’re taking a look at 31199 Marvel Studios Iron Man, which is available now for US $119.99 | CAN $149.99 | UK £114.99. It has 3,167 pieces, and includes instructions to assemble one of three different portraits of various Iron Man suits. Alternatively, if you purchase three copies of the sets, you can build a huge Iron Man image that’s three times the size. So let’s take a look at the new mosaic set and see if it lives up to expectations.

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With this giant LEGO Northrop XB-35, “Winging it” takes on a whole new meaning

When you’re looking at a LEGO creation from someone who’s Flickr handle is “BigPlanes,” you’d expect to see something massive and aeronautical. And, sure enough, this LEGO Northrop XB-35 Flying Wing by Jack Carleson checks those boxes. If you’re looking for information about the technology behind the real XB-35, I’d suggest a trip to Wikipedia. But here at the Brothers Brick, we’re more taken by the excellent building techniques of this model. A masterful combination of SNOT building and Technic wizardry makes this not only a beautiful model but a functional one as well. This huge aircraft has motorized engines, a retractable undercarriage, and even a detailed interior including bomb bays.

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Brutalist beauty in bricks

Builder Nikita Sukhodolov refers to this great monolithic LEGO masterpiece as “The Decaying Hive.” Personally, I don’t see a sense of decay here, probably because I cannot look past its brutalist brilliance. In this build Nikita demonstrates how LEGO and boxy modern architecture are the perfect pairing.

The two main towers of this building feature some great tiling as well as excellent use of 1×1 slope pieces (AKA cheese slopes) in grey and translucent black to create an intricate window design. While the housing units with their carved out of concrete appearance are uniform in their shape; Nikita utilizes translucent clear bricks, 1×2 palisade bricks, as well as 1×2 profile bricks to give each unit a slight variation. The palisade bricks appear as blinds, while some minifigure inhabitants prefer shutters which are created by the profile bricks. There are some splashes of color to liven up the structure such as the pink potted plant and green umbrella on the top of the building as well as the landscape scene which the main build sits upon. Overall I think it’s safe to say that the rigid geometric look of brutalist architecture is clearly well translated into LEGO and Nikita makes this translation look easy with his expert use of some pretty common elements.

Sheena: queen of the jungle or maybe the zoo

LEGO figure builder Letranger Absurde is at it again and this time he’s built Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. Where else but the jungle or possibly the zoo can a bald eagle and a zebra live in the same ecosystem? The builder tells us this idea has been a work in progress since 1874. If you’re like me and believe everything you read on the internet this means he had knowledge of Sheena sixty-three years before she made her comic book debut in 1937. No wonder Letranger is so talented! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to respond to an email from a super-polite Nigerian prince who has a lucrative business proposition in exchange for just a little account information. He seems to be a nice fellah. In the meantime, check out Letranger’s impressive archives, especially the Stone Age Huntress we recently featured.

This gingerbread house looks fingerlicking good

LEGO Builder Grant Davis has been having a lot of fun lately with the 4×4 flower part. Here he’s used it to decorate the roof of this Gingerbread House. But this isn’t the only smart usage of parts in this sweet treat. A gingerbread house is typically decorated by piping icing onto the gingerbread base, and Grant used all sorts of organically shaped white parts to mimic this. Among the parts he used are the egg, the candle and a lot of round, half-round and quarter-round tiles. The use of rubber bands beneath the eaves and for the X-shaped windows deserves a quick mention too. Did you spot the different types of helmets he used for candy?