About Chris Doyle

Chris has been involved in many parts of the LEGO community for over twenty years, and has been building most of his life. A love of transparent bricks and pop culture combine in most of his creations, which tend to be pretty large scale. His website, Reasonably Clever, featured one of the longest running brick-based webcomics, as well as one of the first LEGO-themed avatar creators. His photographs and creations have appeared in several books.

Posts by Chris Doyle

Do space police dream of astronaut llamas? Who would we even ask about that?

The current cold weather in the US has nothing on the cold of deep space. The aptly named Frost brings more love to Febrovery 2021 with the Spy-Trak V: “Trakin’ Spies since ’89”.  Complete with removable prison pod, this sweet ride has an aggressive stance that’s sure to intimidate any Space Llamas it runs across. It’s also an homage to the classic 6895 Spy Trak 1 set from 1989.

Febrovery 2021 Chapter 5 Hot Pursuit

Frost was kind enough to showcase the rover from multiple angles. You can really appreciate the ant-like shaping, and the strong contrast between the transparent red windscreen and the blue of the main body. This is the sort of build that goes to show you don’t have to use a million parts to make a slick creation with outstanding lines.

Spy-Trak V Multiple Views

Frost is building an entire fleet of rovers, and is even writing story around them. Here’s the starting point if you want to read along! And when you’re done, be sure to cruise our archives of other Febrovery builds!

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LEGO 40179 Personalized Mosaic Portrait: downsized, but not in a fun way [Feature]

The LEGO Company is well-known for its excellent customer service. The products are generally high quality, and when errors occur they are quick to issue replacements. However, we recently encountered an unfortunate scenario that left a bad impression. While many of the products we review are provided for us by LEGO itself (which doesn’t mean, of course, that we always give them positive coverage), just like most of you, we also buy a lot of LEGO through regular retail avenues. That’s where I come in. My name is Chris Doyle, and I’m a contributor here at The Brothers Brick. Frequent readers may also recognize my name from the LEGO Art super hero mosaics I’ve been building lately. It’s fair to say I’ve spent a lot (a lot a lot a lot) of money on LEGO mosaic kits and related parts over the past year. When LEGO announced their new 40179 Personalized Mosaic Portrait kit, I quickly found an excuse to buy it. But what do you do when the 6,002-piece set you order arrives and it only has 4,502 pieces? Somewhere along the way, LEGO substantially changed the number of pieces included in this set. Here’s my experience.

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LEGO 40456 & 40457 Brick Sketches: Mickey and Minnie Mouse [Review]

In 2020, LEGO revealed Brick Sketches, a collectible series of brick-built portraits of popular characters. The first wave featured DC comic icons Batman and the Joker, and Star Wars fan favorites BB-8 and a First Order Stormtrooper. A second wave of designs will start arriving in stores on March 1st, and will retail for US $16.99 | CAN $19.99 | UK £14.99. The new sketches feature Disney’s Mickey and Friends, and includes 40456 Mickey Mouse and 40457 Minnie Mouse. How do these new sketches stack up? Are they of any interest beyond just being cute? Read on and see!

The LEGO Group sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of these sets for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.

Click to read the full hands-on review

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

LEGO Marvel Spider-Man 76175 Attack on the Spider Lair [Review]

Batman has the Bat-Cave, and Spider-Man, obviously, has a Spider Lair. (In some universes, anyway.) LEGO mixes and matches different realities to create an amalgam of Spider-gadgetry in Marvel Spider-Man 76175 Attack on the Spider Lair. This 466 piece set will be available March 1st from the LEGO Shop Online for US $69.99 | CAN $89.99 | UK £69.99. Come along as we try and track down Easter eggs and origins in this oddball entry into LEGO Spider-Man lore.

The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.

Click to read the full hands-on review

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

LEGO Ninjago 71746 Jungle Dragon [Review]

The upcoming season of Ninjago is an Island-based storyline, and LEGO will be releasing a number of sets to go along with the televised adventures. The 506 piece Ninjago 71746 Jungle Dragon will be available March 1st from the LEGO Shop Online for US $39.99 | CAN $49.99 | UK £34.99.  It will feature Zippy the Jungle Dragon (yes, really), a small sailboat, and four minifigures. Previous Ninjago dragons have ranged from the really fantastic to the pretty lack-luster. Where does the Jungle Dragon fall on that spectrum? And will it earn bonus points for all that glorious teal brick? Read on and see!

The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.

Click to read the full hands-on review

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

This travel poster will get a rise out of you

Frequent visitors to The Brothers Brick will recognize the name Eero Okkonen. We’ve featured a great number of his amazing sculptural works over the years, most featuring large figure builds. His departures from that theme are just as impressive, though. For Those About To Rise Up, an entry into the Travel Poster challenge for Space Jam 2020, is a marvel of gradient color and design. And, yeah, with a pretty impressive face in the foreground, too. I really like the green hair and coral eyeshadow, but my favorite detail has to be the tiny spaceship that is rocketing to the stars.

For Those About To Rise Up

Thanks to Corona, it feels like I’ve been stuck at home for a thousand years. This poster makes me hopeful there will still be vacation opportunities in the distant future, too.

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

A model model of a model

We all know you can build things out of LEGO, but “building something that you build something out of, out of LEGO” is a sentence that I don’t get to write all that often. Brickleas gave me the chance with this fun diorama of in-progress model building. It makes use of the clip-flag seed part from Iron Forge a whopping 30 times, and finding them all is a fun exercise. My favorites are the bird’s beak, the dab of paint, and the blade in the well-built craft knife.  The rest of the scene has some great details, too. I’m fond of the interesting texture in the hobby mat from the dark green tiles. And the branch the bird is perched on makes use of the minifigure tree disguise. It might be obvious in retrospect, but it feels clever to me.

Model making

This year’s Iron Forge has gifted us with a ton of interesting builds, as our archives show. Go take a look!

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

I like the looks of this Boneseye

There have been a lot of builds inspired by LEGO’s 10281 Bonsai Tree lately, and this is one of the best. Take a close look at this bonsai tree, and you’ll see it looking right back at you. LEGO designer Jme Wheeler has come up with a great build and a quality pun with Boneseye. A mix of eyeball-printed 1×1 round tiles and Technic balls look almost natural in the olive-green foliage, while the twisting white bark of the tree is also full of interesting parts. I spotted  life preserver rings, robot arms, and even some candlestick elements. Oh yeah, and even a bone or two.

Boneseye

While bonsai builds are all the rage right now, they’ve been a staple of creative builds for years. Just take a tour though our bonsai tag and see for yourself.  There are even some creepy ones, like this chain-based creation from 2018.

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

Holy LEGO mosaic, Batman!

Brothers Brick contributor Chris Doyle is back with another heroic pop-culture mosaic in the LEGO art style. Completing his “Trinity” of retro DC superheroes is Batman as portrayed by Adam West. Because of course that’s the version he’d build.

The 1960’s Batman was a far cry from the grim and gritty versions on the screen these days. This was a Batman who was always looking for the best in people, who was always quick to lend a helping hand, and who’s level of violence was limited to “Biff!” and “Pow!” and the occasional “Splatt!” This is the Batman who I’d want to see in my dream Justice League, along with the Lynda Carter version Wonder Woman and Christopher Reeve’s Superman.

batman
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The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

This one will get you right in the feels

There’s something special about a family building LEGO together. Dave Kaleta and son, Elliot, collaborated on this slice-of-life diorama. It was a gift to Elliot’s grandmother, celebrating one of their favorite shared activities: watering the plants in her back yard together. The quality of the build is stunning, but the sentiment behind this is even more touching. But…since this is a LEGO-focused site, let’s take a moment to appreciate the offset between the tiles in the patio, the use of fences in the chairs, and the expressive characters. Even the watering can is a tiny bit of joy.

Oma's Backyard (2021)

If you like this collaboration between Dave and Elliot, you’ll be amazed at the work they did together on their Alphabet fleet.

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Dabs of lively color

Brothers Brick contributor Benjamin Stenlund has been braving the Iron Forge lately, and this artistic build make uses of the seed part of a LEGO banana. And that’s cool and all, but there are other keen details to enjoy. If you look closely you’ll spot some wildlife hanging out in those colorful puddles of paint. And I really do enjoy when a frog shows up unexpectedly as creative part usage. And somehow that rat is even more perfect, with the curve of its tail suggesting a squiggle of paint.

Getting ready for the masterpiece

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This build is bananas, and that’s no bull. No, wait, that *is* a bull.

Forced perspective and clever part usage makes this bullfight from KitKat1414 stand out in a crowded bunch. Get it? Bunch? Because of the LEGO banana seed part from the latest round of Iron Forge? C’mon, work with me here. The bull makes great use of them in the horns, but did you also spot them in the gate in the background? How about in the pile of kicked up sand behind the bull’s hoof?  I also like the multicolored 1×1 round plate serving as the crowd in the background. Good stuff.

04 El Toro

If bullfights aren’t your thing, you can always check out some other animal related creations and find something that suits you better!

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.