What if Jim Henson had worked with ABS plastic instead of felt when he started creating the Muppets? Maybe they’d look something like the incredible characters of Chicago-based LEGO builder Greg Scherrer. Each model shows an uncanny talent for bringing out personality in bricks, with a cartoonist’s playfulness in form and color and a puppeteer’s playfulness with motion. It makes sense seeing as Greg is a cartoonist and illustrator by trade. We reached out to the builder to learn a bit more about his process.

“For the past couple of years, I’ve gotten pretty into creating improvised brick-built characters. I try to stock up my parts collection with the kinds of pieces that inspire me, lots of bright colors and curved slopes. My approach to building characters is then fully improvised based on my parts inventory. I’ve never built digitally, and I rarely leave a build unfinished to wait on an order of something specific.

The fun of building characters for me is in the improvisation and problem-solving on-the-go. I’ll often start off with just wanting to try out a build idea for eyes, or a mouth that hinges for a potential working puppet. From there, I completely lose track of time and can spend hours figuring out what I’m building and making it work.

 Just like in cartooning, there are little tricks that have been fun to discover for making characters cute or expressive. Most of all, I like the feeling that I can just start playing, notice a part or a new connection, and surprise myself with where it leads me.”

The range of of techniques that Greg employs for his characters is truly inspiring. Creating a shag effect from 2×1 tiles on mixel joints is such a clever and charming way to achieve both more organic shapes from blocks and a bit of messiness.

Greg is equally adept at creatures and more humanoid forms, but even with a similar subject – a human head and torso – he refuses to be pinned down. The “negative space” person is a fairly simple built in concept, but the posing makes it come alive just as much as the spaghetti-armed mustachioed man with its impressive jigsaw of curves. Again, I’m reminded of Jim Henson at his most experimental when a simple geometric form could be as expressive as a human in a body suit.

Greg’s brown pony is an absolute ham with its tube limbs, cable hair and bracelet band belly. Who said making a horse is hard?

Try looking at these weird little dudes without smiling. Even if they’re not puppets, I can’t help but imagine them moving and muttering in silly voices.

I saved perhaps my favorite of Greg’s characters for last – It’s Tubey the Elephant, the elephant made of tubes! There’s a sweetness to this ponderous pachyderm that’s hard to resist.

With its crowd-pleasing appeal, Greg’s delightful work seems destined for LEGO House. In the meantime, be sure to follow the builder on Instagram for many more characters and videos.