About Bart Willen

Bart Willen (badboytje88) has been a fan of LEGO for as long as he can remember. When he hit puberty and slowly but surely started losing interest in the brick, LEGO released their first line of Harry Potter sets. Keeping Bart from slipping to a Dark Age. He is a fan of a quite broad range of themes, from Star Wars to Johny Thunder and from Elves to City. But somehow he always navigates back to the magical world of Harry Potter. He attends LEGO World in the Jaarbuurs in Utrecht on a yearly basis where he enjoys meeting other fans and seeing some of their creations 'in the brick'. You can check out his own creations here.

Posts by Bart Willen

This Eeyore is the embodiment of 2020 to me

Eeyore has to be everyone’s favorite sad little donkey. To me this creation by Kristal, the partner of Jason Allemann, embodies the year 2020 perfectly. He looks so sad with those droopy ears, sad eyes and the semi permanent rain clowd above his head. Eeyore has had quite some redesign over the years. He started out as a grey and black donkey. In the animated series he still was grey but the inside of his ears was pink and he had a pink bow on the end of his tail making him look a bit more colourfull. Today Eeyore is a bit more purple/light blue coloured which makes him look a lot less depressed. I am glad Kristal went for the sad and grey variant of the beloved donkey. The demure tones of sand blue, sand green and olive green of the surrounding help Eeyore look even more sad…

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Grave Walker I would like to adopt as a pet

This LEGO Grave Walker made by Alex looks like something straight out of a Tim Burton film. The microscale graveyard looks very good and spooky. But the absolute stunner of this creation has to be the catlike skeleton with the pumpkin for a head.

I am not a huge fan of taxidermy, but I would consider displaying this animal-friendly type of taxidermy in my home. The skeleton looks super fragile but, at the same time, quite sturdy and, above all, quite posable. If anyone figured out how the pumpkin head is made, please do let me know. I have been trying to deconstruct it in my head for the past 10 minutes, but I can not figure it out…

Green tinted window canopies for everyone

The Brick Artisan might call this creation a LG-401 Dioptase Moth, but all I can see is a Yanma from Pokémon. A lot is going on in this creation, including an abundance of older parts. The arms are made of the homemaker figure arms. The large variety of trans-green parts were certainly and inspiration to build this wonderful creation. I personally didn’t know the Modified Facet 3 x 3 x 2 Top came in trans-green, but now I do. To me, the best part of this creation has to be the really large Belville castle doors being used as wings for this creature. Using castle doors in a space creation sounds like a bad idea, but they look stunning!

I guess Sulley is no longer the number one scarer!

We all know Mike Wazowski as Sulley’s best friend and working partner at Monsters, Inc.. He supports Sulley about being the number one scarer. But if it were up to Bart de Dobbelaer, Mike Wazowski would have looked a bit more like a number one scarer himself. Bart based this LEGO creation on the art of Austen Mengler and I have to say, this Mike looks ready to collect some serious screams! Although this creation looks quite small, in reality it must be quite big. Mike’s iconic eye is made of hot air balloon parts which means there is an entire hot air balloon hidden inside this figure.

Bloodborne Hunters Dream

The game Bloodborne holds a very special place in the heart of Nathan Hake. It inspired him to make this LEGO Bloodborne Hunters Dream creation. The build took about a year to make and I can understand why. Hunters Dream is a location in Bloodborne. Also known as Dream Refuge, it is the place where the player goes after their first death and operates as a central hub, providing trade and upgrade services. The player can port from this location to any of the Lamps that they have activated.

More than a year later Nathan decides to remember his epic creation by making a micro-scale hunters dream and it is absolutely stunning. Not only is the building very recognizable. The whole ambiance of the big creation is well translated to the micro-scale build.

Work in progress or finished creation?

Is Katja and Ryan’s LEGO creation a finished work or a work in progress? Well the creation itself is finished, but the church is far from finished and it is nice to see how the structure is being created from the ground up. From the flooring to the pillars to the stained glass windows, the roofing, and the gargoyles. There is also a lot going on around the church on the ground. Among the activity is a small model of what the church will look like when finished. There is a cart delivering a Madonna and Child statue and an artist creating a painting of the church to be. There are a lot of small details to behold. Can you find the poor guy getting sprayed by a skunk in the background?

LEGO partners with Unity for LEGO Microgame, a platform for designing your own game with virtual bricks [News]

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, LEGO Games is partnering with Unity, the world’s leading 3D content development platform, to bring us a new videogame known as LEGO Microgame. Unity offers guided experiences designed to make game development less intimidating for new users, and starting October 26, you will be able to build your very own LEGO game, brick by virtual brick.

LEGO touts the new Microgame as being created with adult fans of LEGO in mind. It is targeted at people who are taking their first steps into the world of videogame creation and the company says it is designed to make this a fun and welcoming experience. You can even import your own creations built in Bricklink Studio as well as share the games you design on the Unity platform. At the time of writing, there’s not a huge amount we know about the gameplay itself yet, but you can check out a trailer for the game and read the official press release below.

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What a charming charmed tent!

One of the things in the Harry Potter universe that always caught my attention was the charmed tents. Nothing as magical as 3 people entering a really small tent to discover that it is very spacious on the inside. Caleb Schilling takes this setting and gives us the Quidditch World Cup scene where the Weasley family camps in a borrowed charmed tent during the sport event. The tent is made of fabric, which is really hard to create with a hard plastic construction toy. However, Caleb managed to make the flowing fabric feel come across quite beautifully thanks to the round wall, patterns on all the walls, and the curtains hanging from the ceiling. The tent has everything a family needs to camp in comfort: beds, couches, chairs, tables, a heating stove, and even a rug with fringe!

Small autumn garden, or maybe not so small at all

Kris Kelvin calls this creation a small autumn garden and I have to disagree with him on the small part. However, it is a really nice build, and it makes me realize that I probably should attend to my garden a bit more as it looks nowhere near as maintained as this LEGO garden does. Over the years, LEGO has released lots of fruits and vegetables. We’ve got cherries, apples, carrots, bananas, and pumpkins. But what is more fun than building your own vegetable plants? Kris used lavender studs with 3 leaves to create red cabbage or is it lollo rosso lettuce. He also made cauliflower using the same leaves part in green and a white swirl brick. And then there is the egg used as a white eggplant. Last but not least there are a lot of minifigure hair parts used as lettuce or cabbage, something LEGO has been doing for a while now too. I might have it all wrong, but this is how I identify the vegetables in this garden. What vegetables do you recognize?

The play at Chapel Street

As I might have mentioned before, I am a sucker for using the old castle minifigures in creations using intriguing LEGO building techniques. Something about the mix of classic and modern just feels right to me. Atahlus latest build ticks all the boxes for me. Both buildings are filled with details. I love how the gothic building on the right is symmetrical for the most part, but some of the details are not. The offset between the woodwork and the yellow wall on the left is also quite nicely done. The base on which the houses are built is oddly shaped, which to me, always is a plus. Even the minifigures in the creation are not just there to fill the space; they tell a story (quite literally in this case).

Fishing in muddy waters

To me, LEGO builder Ralf Langer is known for his quite technical timbered buildings. This creation is no exception. We all know building a round structure with square LEGO bricks can be quite a challenge. As you can see a lot of the creation is round: the roof, the wooden staircase made of bars and tread links beside the tower, the bay window on the building on the right, the bridge between the two buildings, and that domed roof made with triangular road signs. Ralf almost makes it look easy. One of the best things about this creation is the usage of black sausages, round 1×1 plates with an open stud and brown 1×6 arches to create a round shape for the tower. Very clever! Another thing that deserves a mention is the use of the plant stem with 3 leaves to create the foliage for the trees. There are a lot of nice techniques and details to discover, but I’ll let you discover those yourself.

The Lost Boys found a home in Neverland [Video]

LEGO builder and former LEGO Masters contestant Aaron Newman is no stranger to The Brothers Brick, and his latest creation earns him another mention for good reason. Aaron designed the Lost Boys hideout, the iconic location from the 1953 Disney adaptation of Peter Pan. In typical fashion for Aaron, the model is designed as a playset. So it has lots of action features throughout the model: the tree opens up in several places by pulling a string, and there is a secret rock passageway, a basket elevator and a light-up fireplace.

The lineup of minifigures is great as well, combining a few official Peter Pan characters from the Disney Collectible Minifigure series with a handful of custom figs that are excellently put together. Especially the Darling family is spot on. Beyond the figs, don’t miss the curved tapered panel used as hammocks. If this was an official set, I’d buy it!

Be sure to check out this video with Aaron to see all the details, and take a look at our interviews with Aaron about his build style and being a contestant on LEGO Masters.