About Elspeth De Montes

Elspeth De Montes is Scottish but lives in North Yorkshire with her partner and twins. She is a LEGO Builder not a collector of sets, which in theory should make the hobby less expensive (ahem!) but monochrome collections can be pricey. You can see more of Elspeth's work on her blog or website and Flickr. Elspeth is also a bike lover; mountain bike, fixie, road bike, tri-bike (n+1=number of bikes I need).

Posts by Elspeth De Montes

For John

Art in all its forms is a means of expression, be that joy, sadness, humour, grief, love. In the LEGO community it is not surprising that we turn to our bricks as a method of processing and dealing with emotions. This touching build by Chris Maddison is his tribute to a friend who sadly passed away too young. Sometimes it is best to just let a build speak for itself.

For those of us who choose to build with small plastic bricks, the actual act of carefully placing bricks together becomes therapeutic.

The final creation often expresses far more than words could ever say.

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When I was your age ‘streaming media’ was called books...

Meet Ol’ Barney, an opinionated, grumpy old man created by Centuri. His fingers are gnarled, his bones ache when it rains, those teeth have done a lifetime of chomping and you’re going to need to speak up boy!

Ol’ Barney has some fun parts use by Centuri. Some of the ones I spotted are the white croissants for his eyebrows, tan hair for his ears, a gold ingot belt buckle and what could better be better than ‘knobbly knees’ made of Technic connectors.

Now go and do something useful…when I was your age we didn’t just sit around playing with kiddie toys…

Alien Project by The Arvo Brothers [Review]

The Arvo Brothers (Ramon & Amador Alfaro Marcilla) have recently released their second book called Alien Project. It costs €26 + shipping and can be purchased via the Arvo Brothers website. The main bulk of the book contains detailed instructions for building their fantastic Alien figure and its base. There are also chapters explaining the inspiration behind the project and a rare insight into the development of a model of this calibre. Below is my review of the book.

Click here to read the full review

Si-BORED Industries new drone creates a BUZZ of excitement

Now the festivities are over, the presents opened, and the New Year welcomed in, we can turn our focus to Droneuary. During the month of ~~January~~ Droneuary, there is a definite surge in the production of new drones within the LEGO community. These Wichtigtuer Beinenstick (lit. “busy-body beehive”) drones by our very own Simon Liu are busy with a hive task.

Simon’s winged, honey-logistic drones were developed in response to comments on the original Wichtigtuer drone, which launched a couple of days ago. The original pectacular drones came armed with an ingenious brick-built weapon, complete with ironsight. Clearly the winged drone had to drop some lower body weight to achieve the miracle of flight.

Transforming LEGO Nemesis Prime is almost cute

Fans of Transformers will immediately recognise Nemesis Prime, the evil clone of the Autobot leader Optimus Prime, built by Japanese builder Moko. Brick-built Transformers have been featured before on TBB, but Moko’s build is a little bit different. Transformers originated as an animated television series in the 1980s. In the series Nemesis Prime is an evil, merciless killer …but oh my goodness, now he is super cute!

Moko has gone for the chibi feel with this build, yet manages to maintain accuracy and detail despite the diminutive stature. And as if that was not enough, his Nemesis Prime even transforms:

If you want to see detailed views, Moko has more photos of his builds of Nemesis Prime and Optimus Prime on his own blog. (Note: Moko’s blog is in Japanese, but the photographs are easily seen as thumbnails and Google roughly translates the page)

Going where no lime wedge has gone before

British builder Tim Goddard (aka Rogue Bantha) is well-known for building Space-themed creations, and his newest build is an eye-catching lime spaceship. The ‘classic space’ colours of grey, blue and transparent yellow have been shunned to create this sublime spaceship. This is another of Tim’s own explorations to broaden his use of colour within the Space theme; we previously blogged his white, tan and azure microscale spacecraft.

Tim’s curved ship is beautifully shaped and vaguely reminiscent of a lime wedge in my mind. There are some lovely little details including discrete use of official LEGO stickers. I am definitely a fan of Tim’s ‘greebles’, whose positioning suggests a hugely complex spaceship by showing a ‘teaser’ surface view. The ship’s hull is suitably futuristic with just the right amounts of lime balanced by white and light blueish grey.

The somewhat garish lime colouring and abundance of probes suggests this is more of a scientific exploration vessel, unless it has a cloaking mechanism…

Carrion spotted, on final landing approach

Australian builder Shannon Sproule has created a LEGO model of one of the seemingly less graceful birds of prey – the vulture. Shannon says he based this build on the griffon vulture, and with an average wing span of 2.5m (8 ft) in real life, these birds are impressive creatures.

The position of the outstretched feet, ducked head and ‘flaps down’ wing position has really captured the body positioning of a typical griffon vulture landing. While the vulture appears to be coming in to land near some carrion, the birds-eye view spares us from the sight of a decaying animal… just use your imagination.

Charing Cross station, in Victorian times, built with LEGO bricks

Seattle builder Dave Sterling has built a LEGO version of London’s Charing Cross Railway Station as it appeared in the late-Victorian period. Dave’s creation formed part of an international collaboration entitled Around the World in 80 days which was displayed at Brickworld Chigaco. Dave has really captured the intricate details and elaborate exterior features representative of Victorian architecture.

A replica of the 70ft high Eleanor Cross was built in the forecourt of the station in 1865, and this is very nicely depicted in Dave’s build by the ornate tall ‘cross’ complete with tan microfigs, masonry bricks and arches.

Click here to learn more about this creation and hear from the builder

It’s all downhill for now

This downhill creation from Graham Gidman is one of his entries to this year’s medieval-themed contest Colossal Castle Contest XIII.

The builder describes the scene as ‘Graham leading his men down the mountainside start the fight‘ (I am paraphrasing somewhat). The unusual proportions caught my eye initially as the build is high but of narrow depth and depicts a sloped mountain descent that would be perfect for a spot of single-track mountain biking.

I have favourite and not-so favourite parts in this creation. I will start with my no-so favourite as I don’t want to sound overly negative about this great build. While I like the technique of light/dark blueish-grey slopes and tiles ‘jumbled’ to create the mountainside, it suffers slightly from being very flat and smooth on the facing side. Maybe a little more ‘cragginess‘ next time…

Moving swiftly on to my favourites, the red feathered bird in the nest is great; I think the nest may be Bilbo Baggins hair. I also like the skilfully created sloped tracks — a lot has been achieved without making the terrain look too contrived. Finally, the little collection of overgrown greenery in the middle left area is a nice touch.

This year’s Colossal Castle Contest has been brimming with great entries, you can see others blogged by TBB.

This is not the ‘tower’ you are looking for

Apologies if you were hoping to avoid a Star Wars related post but there is a tenuous link to castles and towers, I promise. TBB regular Simply Bricking It, has built our favourite Star Wars droid, R2-D2.

The builder uses a mix of round and regular parts to allow a slight offset position, resulting in the curved shape. The use of alternate round and regular bricks is a technique that has been used frequently in the past for curved ‘tower’ structures (eg. castles, windmills, lighthouses and even spaceships). But I believe this is the first droid I have seen built using this particular technique.

I can’t finish this post without mentioning the vintage tap parts used for R2D2’s leg detailing — a ‘splash’ of inspiration there.

An apeeling way to get your 5-a-day

We all know how important it is to get your dose of fruit and vegetables each day and Japanese builder and TBB regular nobu_tary has two creations full of Potassium, Vitamin C, Vitamin B and …well actually they’re just LEGO.

This is the best LEGO banana I have seen, the varied wedges are a perfect choice to form the peeled banana skin and the use of lime, reddish-brown and black at the end really adds to the realism. I also note that the builder has peeled the banana the ‘correct‘ way to avoid bruising the flesh.

A plate of broccoli is the second build served up by nobu_tary. The angle of the photographs help the plant limb elements (Part 2423 and Part 2417) appear more ‘broccoli-like’ along with the lighter stem in lime elements.

A perfect combination – the LEGO Enigma machine

The current Iron Builder battle has been producing some fantastic builds and the latest entry by David Hensel is definitely one of my favourites. The Enigma machine built by David is a LEGO replica of the German military model used during and after the Second World War.

The Enigma machine is a combination of mechanical and electrical subsystems. The mechanical subsystem consists of a keyboard; in David’s model this is the main area using the Iron Builder seed part, the Fencer’s Foil. There are also a set of rotating disks called rotors (Technic Gear 24 Tooth Crown) arranged adjacently along a spindle, and a method of ‘stepping’ to turn at least one rotor with each key press (1×1 round tiles).

David, can you just whip up a quick LEGO British Bombe to help decipher your LEGO Enigma machine please?