About David Guedes

David Guedes, aka Lettuce, has been building with LEGO all his life, though he had a “dim age” in his teens, and didn’t buy any new sets for 6 years. He has been active in the fan community since 2014, regularly displaying creations at conventions like BrickCon and BrickCan, as well as interacting with fans of LEGO of all ages. David is a member of the VLC and a founder of DaveLUG. He lives just outside of Vancouver, with his wife, two sons, a dog, and a house full of little plastic bricks. His flickr account can be found here.

Posts by David Guedes

This frightening flower could eat you right up

The new LEGO Bouquet set is all the rage right now, so it’s cool to see some LEGO fans build their own brick-built potted plants. Aiden Rexroad joined in the fun with a truly frightening Flos Corpus.

Flos Corpus

This creation is impressive in that you can, more or less, see all the parts he used. But don’t let that relative simplicity take anything away from how terrific (or terror-ific) this flower looks. This meat-eating plant brandishes rows of sharp teeth tucked inside some beautiful purple petals — petals expertly made up of purple Bionicle Pakari masks. The Bionicle theme continues down the stem, with leaves of Bionicle Rahkshi Kraata. Luckily this little plant is contained to a pot. If it had legs, I’d be truly scared of it walking over, licking me with its slimy pink tongue, and taking a big chomp outta my leg.

Tweet tweet tweet! Goes the robin

Life size (or near life size) birds have long been a popular subject matter for LEGO creations. While many previous birds have featured some pretty cool parts usage, KitKat1414 uses a pretty innovative technique for this Robin’s face. It’s just one piece, but a red minifigure torso managed to accomplish so many different things.

02 Erithacus Rubecula

The first thing that jumps out at you is the arm holes as eyes. The size is just perfect. Second, you’ll see the neck as the bird’s beak. Sure it’s round where a real beak should be conical, but it very clearly represents and communicates that piece of the bird’s anatomy. Finally, the not to be overlooked, subtle design feature the torso lends to this bird is the angle it gives the face. I can’t think of any other single LEGO piece, or even pair of pieces that could accomplish as much as this one, incredibly common, often overlooked element does.

Ho! Ho! Oh no! Santa is stuck!

2020 has been a hard year for everyone, and some of us have put on a few extra quarantine pounds. Ian Hou’s LEGO Santa Claus is no exception, as evidenced by the quarter round bricks shaping his belly. It seems that Jolly ole Saint Nick misjudged how many milk and cookies he’d been eating.

nEO_IMG_Santa! You break my chimney!_01

Now a previously comfortable slide down a chimney is a bit more than a tight squeeze! I think Santa jumped in pretty fast and built up some speed too because of the angle on those hinged bricks tell me chunks of that chimney are flying off pretty quickly. And I think he’s noticed too, the 1×3 arches forming his mouth look like his “Ho! Ho! Ho!” has turned into an “Oh! Ow! Ow!”

Get back you knobby white freaks!

First Order Lego has been killing it lately with some out of this world LEGO Star Wars Creations. And if you search my post history here on The Brothers Brick, you’ll see that I love sharing top-notch LEGO creations based on Star Wars. So naturally, this scene from Chapter 10 of the Mandalorian had to be shared.

“Krykna Escape” The Mandalorian Chapter 10

Aside from the beautifully crafted snowy landscape, the first thing you notice is the Krykna of various sizes. An amazing variety of pieces have been used for the spiders’ legs, from different kinds of horns to bananas! Some spiders are small, some are dead, but my favourite one is the one we can’t even see – the giant one just coming around the corner! There are plenty of other details presented to explore here, but custom-made little bitty baby Yoda is not to be overlooked.

A troll trolls us all

Internet trolling takes many forms. Sometimes it means building an awesome LEGO troll, showcasing pieces from some maligned LEGO themes, the way David Doci has. Attempt at trolling or not, this is not the typical LEGO creation you see online and I think that’s awesome. This is clearly a masterfully built giant troll. The scale is obvious by the bits of minifigure bones on his belt (a belt made of the uncommonly used Bionicle chain). You may look at it and be like “Are those pieces even LEGO?” and I can assure you, they are. The torso and armour belong to Euripides from Galidor, while the head belongs to Ogrum from Hero Factory (with some expertly place red horns for eyes).

Troll Warrior

This is fine.

Some LEGO creations are just so representative of their subject material, it’s eerie. If you put this picture of Koala Yummies’ creation next to a calendar of the year 2020, I wouldn’t be able to point out which is which. In a year in which so much is going wrong, many people are finding LEGO to be a great way to keep distracted from the bad news and stay sane. This creation uses a technique that is easy to attempt, but in my opinion difficult to do well: dumping piles of loose bricks everywhere. Even when the world is falling apart around you and you’re waist-deep in LEGO bricks to sort, you can still pause with a warm beverage and tell yourself “This is fine”.

1_D4C5707

A turn of a wrench and a dollop of grease et voila!

LEGO creations are true to the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” in that they can tell amazing stories without any text. And even though Bart De Dobbelaer has provided a story alongside his creation, this one can speak for itself.

Bot Wars 2086 - the Repairman

The backdrop of rusty and grimy metal – effortlessly conveyed with simple colour choices (dark grey metal, dark orange rust, and sand green algae) – tells you a lot about where we find ourselves. This isn’t a peaceful, pristine repair shop. No, it’s a rough and tough place. Those walls have seen some stuff. The bold colour choices extend to the numerous bots as well, with their rusty metal frames being complimented by a smorgasbord of fun parts usages in red and yellow. If you’re a LEGO parts monkey like me, you’ll have a heck of a fun time trying to identify everything used to build these bots. Lost in the chaos is the titular repairman himself, doing what he can to strap these bots together and keep them running. While I have hope he can fix some of these robot folks up, the story might not have a happy ending for all of them, as the smattering of loose yellow and red parts tell the story of those bots that didn’t make it to the party.

Nature is reclaiming the palace, beautiful floor and all

It’s always fun to see what LEGO builders can come up with when encouraged to think of new ways to use particular pieces. And that’s exactly what Tom Loftus has done in this abandoned throne room with dark red 2×3 shields. The first place you’ll notice it is as the seat of the three thrones, which I really think works well.

01 - A Time Forgotten

I particularly like the overall design of the two smaller chairs – the seashell piece makes a very nice palmette on the seatback. The other place these shield parts are used on the floor, in a really genius kind of way. By arranging the front of the piece in a triangle, the handles on the back form a simple pattern. Repeat that 30 or so times and you have a really stunning looking floor. As a bonus, the spaces between the handles work really well for the overgrown motif, as they create the perfect gap for plant elements to be stuck into. A final note about the whole overgrown look: rather than just use clear bricks as windows and leave it at that, Tom covered the opposite side of the clear bricks with tree branches, blocking some of the light that would come through, just like vines on a real overgrown window.

Halloween this year brings a full moon, and a full moon brings...

It’s spooky season, and that means it’s time for spooky LEGO creations. And what’s spookier than Nathan Hake’s feasting werewolf? Spooky might even be an understatement, this thing is downright frightening. Maybe even scary.

Lego werewolf

It’s also incredibly well built. The werewolf itself is expertly sculpted using a plethora of bars and robot body parts, as well as ample minifigure hands for extra detail. There’s something meta about a vicious werewolf being built out of people’s hands! For me, the icing on this terrifying cake is the use of the sails from the Silent Mary, a somewhat haunted pirate ship, as ripped and torn clothes hanging off of the foul beast. Not to be overlooked is the expert scenery, acting as a backdrop. The lamppost elicits a Victorian vibe, an era that’s spooky in and of itself. Underneath the beast and the blood dripping from its mouth, the sidewalk tiles lay beautifully. Simple plates and tiles are arranged in a way to give the texture perfect for the setting.

Cue: Ludwig Göransson’s theme music. Enter: the Mandalorian

Season two of the Mandalorian is right around the corner, and fabulous LEGO creations inspired by the show keep on coming. Neil and Joanne Snowball return with their mosaic of the titular character to accompany their previous mosaic of the true star of the show.

Depicting our hero from the first half of season 1, this recreation of Mando gives off a real comic book or 8-bit videogame aesthetic. And even with that simple static style, an incredible sense of motion is conveyed: it’s obvious that he’s walking towards you, his cape blowing in the wind. Perhaps you have something he wants. Perhaps you should let that precious baby Yoda go. Perhaps you should listen up, so you don’t get disintegrated by that Amban phase-pulse blaster on Mando’s back. Could this be a scene from season 2? Only time will tell.

Click to see The Mandalorian with Baby Yoda

Alas, a fellow of infinite jest

Pardon the nonsensical title, but who can look at a skull-like this and not think of poor Yorick? Unfortunately, we used the quotation that I’m sure many of you are thinking of for a LEGO skeleton holding its own skull in 2006, forcing me to use the messy hacked up title that I did. That wasn’t the case for TBB alum Nick Jensen though, as he sculpted quite the smooth looking skull.

ODDBALL. Play ball.

I don’t think I’d be wrong to call Nick the master of 1 to 1 LEGO weaponry, so it makes sense that he’s also skilled at recreating what happens to someone who faces down the wrong end of that weaponry! This LEGO skull is a great exemplar of what can be done with rounded and angled elements like slopes and wedges. I can’t really explain why, but I love the way the 3×4 triple curved wedges are held in place with 2×2 corner tiles to shape the sides of the forehead. The gold tooth is a nice touch too!

Gotta shake those TIEs

I’m always impressed to see different LEGO parts, techniques, and scales used to recreate iconic Star Wars ships. Lennart Cort’s Millennium Falcon and TIE Fighters are the latest to impress the heck outta me. Whether the scale or the technique, I’m loving this fresh take.

STAR WARS

Achieving the shaping of the TIE Fighter wing panels, while also wrapping them in the gray border is impressive. The laser bolts being fired make great use of trans neon green antennae! The Falcon itself is impressively done too with some equally entertaining parts usages at a scale that’s similar to the Midi-Scale Millennium Falcon. The round technic connector is perfect for the sides of the Correllian freighter, and bladed claw weapon makes the perfect quadlaser. It’s time for that quadlaser to turn around and blast those TIEs!