About Faiza Khan

Faiza is a life long fan of LEGO who has since 2018 become a more serious collector and aspiring MOC maker. His other hobbies include: pop culture consumption, traveling when possible, gaming, and good conversation.

Posts by Faiza Khan

Show them the door

Take a drive through any East Coast city in America, small or large, and you’ll find brownstone townhouses, their facades almost like familiar faces. Eli Willsea incorporates this sense of familiarity into his intricate brick-built brownstone doorway.

The building façade’s construction is cleverly composed of grey 1×1 jumpers with dark orange 1×1 and 1×2 tiles – this construction approach achieves a brick and mortar aesthetic. The door itself is comprised of mostly yellow tiling with some silver matte pieces to render the doorknob, mail slot, and door knocker. Willsea uses various white elements, including hinge pieces, 1×1 scroll bricks, cylinders, 1×2 slopes, and claw pieces to render a moderately decorated trim. Perhaps the most ornate part of this build is the lunette – the half-moon shaped window above the door, which is mostly composed of yellow 9V track switches – a pretty unusual element, along with some yellow tiles of various shapes and a minifigure head. I appreciate Willsea throwing in some urban foliage, including some vines climbing up the façade along with a few other LEGO plant elements sparsely populating the ground. This build, although simple in the subject, certainly gets my mind out of the suburbs and back into the city.

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Cue the monk music as you wield this LEGO Halo energy sword

It is only fitting to think about the Halo Gregorian chant as I look upon this amazing brick-built Covenant energy sword – a holy weapon wielded by the noble class of the Sangheili species, crafted by Nick Jensen. According to Nick’s specs, the sword is comprised of a whopping six pounds of LEGO bricks and is 41.5″ long. No adhesives such as tape or glue were used – talk about clutch power!

The inner portion of the blade of the energy sword is mostly comprised of clear-colored and light blue 1×2 trans-clear plates and 1×1 round tiles while the outer portion is made of trans-clear bricks and slopes in light blue, clear, and pink.

The handle is crafted out of a menagerie of bricks, tiles, dome-tops, and slopes in mostly blacks and greys with some trans-clear parts. Nick also smartly constructed a couple of stands to display this amazing work. It definitely must feel pretty empowering to hold this sword – even if it is only a model made of bricks. It looks almost exactly as I remember it from the games. The Master Chief’s weapons have got nothing on this beauty.

Lime Green Brick Machine

“Now this is podracing!” – one of the many famous lines from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace can be applied to this LEGO model by Penny Drop on Instagram. This mean machine and its pilot are of the more obscure racers in the film. The LEGO group tends to release sets centered around Anakin’s podracer while sometimes including Sebulba as well, therefore it is refreshing when fans create models of the lesser-known competitors.

A podracer is really only comprised of two components – the cockpit and the engine. Penny utilized some lime green bricks and slopes for the cockpit and for the engine Penny has put to use some large lime green rims and technic elements in addition to a few bricks and slopes. I appreciate the application of the round saw blade elements in conjunction with some silver dishes for the auxiliary thrusters. It’s nice to see the build as a whole displayed on a brick-built stand, mimicking the Mos Espa arena circuit. Podracers watch out, Penny has certainly built a worthy opponent!

A box full of summer, courtesy of IKEA

The product of the recent LEGO-IKEA collaboration, the BYGGLEK box, has practically become the new LEGO baseplate. I’ve already seen a ton of interesting models incorporating this new 3D template. Lego fjotten’s modern boxy beach house is a great example of the creativity that can be achieved with a studded plastic parallelogram.

Fjotten uses two of these boxes for the first and third stories of this structure while the second floor is a hybrid — part BYGGLEK box, part brick-built. I really enjoy the application of brown tiling, bricks, and black telescope pieces to create balcony railing, flooring, and stairs. Fjotten also cleverly adds windows onto his building by utilizing the notches molded into the boxes. Of course, all of the ancillary details of the build – the furniture, grill, jacuzzi, and other brick-built pieces of décor are a delight. I have to say, adopting the BYGGLEK box in this capacity is actually quite advantageous in that Fjotten probably saved a lot of time and bricks by using it to compose the majority of the structure. Models like these really serve to show the true creative energy builders can channel through any LEGO element or product, and I am excited to see more builds incorporating these boxes in the future.

It’s a fish-eat-fish world

Can’t visit a natural history museum or an aquarium? Luis Peña has us covered with his LEGO build of a couple Devonian sea critters – the larger of which is the Dunkleosteus and then its smaller prey being the Stethacanthus.

Peña certainly got all of the anatomical details of both fish correct from the eye placement on the Dunkleosteus to the anvil-shaped fin of the Stethacanthus. Both builds are also are seemingly correct in terms scale as the Stethacanthus was actually a pretty small shark-like fish. Peña’s use of differing white slope pieces is effective in rendering the teeth of the Dunkleosteus; I also appreciated his use of the feather-pin element as the tail for the tinier fish. Thankfully the Devonian age has passed; these sea creatures seemed to have been pretty frightening, whether big or small, but it’s definitely pleasant to be able to learn about them in some capacity.

Herbology class is in session

Since 2018 the LEGO wizarding world has been expanding via collectible minifigure series as well as sets based on the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts films. All of the newly available minifigures and elements have really stirred up the imaginations of Potterheads and have inspired some great work. One of these exemplary builders is Kale Frost who invites us to sit in on a lesson at Hogwarts with his build of a Herbology classroom.

Kale’s brick-built greenhouse is a truly magical creation, the stars of the scene I would say are some of the newer elements he included as well as the latest Professor Pomona Sprout minifigure. Also from the second Harry Potter collectible minifigures series, is the potions book featured in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. He incorporates elements from other themes such as the geode from LEGO City Space and the teal headphones from Monkie Kid, both pieces also being fairly new. This vignette certainly makes me wish I was a minifigure, I could throw on those teal headphones and cultivate some mandrakes to whip up various restorative potions.

Buckle up, this car is a real winner

Okay, so the BMW M8 GTE didn’t actually perform well in the 2018 Le Mans endurance event, nonetheless this vehicle translated into LEGO by builder Lasse Deleuran is still a winner in my eyes.

The custom decals, the gold rims, and the racing colors on this brick-built racecar make me want to speed away, luckily for everyone on the roads in New York that actually won’t happen. Deleuran’s choice in rendering this sportscar’s windshield using black LEGO tiles instead of a trans-clear piece is an interesting, albeit effective one. I also thought his use of the clipped 1×2 plate along with the black bar was a clever way to build windshield wipers. While the actual BMW M8 GTE isn’t exactly a winner, its brick-built counterpart has surely won my heart.

Jumping for joy on the moon

For some, the month of April in the year 1972 may not be memorable but for astronaut John W. Young this date marks the journey of a lifetime – he became the ninth person to walk on the moon. Young’s iconic jumping salute which has been captured both in photography and video is recreated in LEGO bricks by spacemanship123.

This brick-built astronaut seems to make use of a lot of tile type pieces as well as some slopes and a few LEGO Technic elements. A spacesuit does seem like it would be a tough model to design because of its bulky nature and also its requirement for articulation seeing as it is a figural build striking a pose. Designer spacemanship123 was able to make it happen by using various clip pieces in addition to some ball and joint elements. Overall I would say the idea behind this build is unique, perhaps even out of this world! It’s not an everyday occasion that a human lands on the moon, or that an astronaut is built out of bricks.

An alternative to coarse sand and cold space

Most Star Wars sets and fan creations tend to take the form of ships or other types of vehicles, of course LEGO has welcomed more buildings recently but such builds are still a minority in the theme. Eloi Parizeau takes us to Naboo not in a starship but with his LEGO micro-build of the Theed Royal Palace.

The nicest thing about working in micro-scale is that a builder is able to use small parts that are actually pretty common or easy to obtain, Parizeau’s structural build of the palace consists of some pretty standard parts in varying shapes and sizes such as dishes, cones, tiles, and slopes. The colors he utilizes for this creation as a whole are a little uncommon including pieces in forest green, tan, and sand green. The one part that seems rather unique to me is the rock panel in dark grey.

Using these small pieces Parizeau not only recreates the structure of the Theed Palace, but also the beautiful and lush environment of Naboo, his use of the forest green slopes and bricks along with the trans-clear blue elements brings back scenes from the Star Wars prequel films which portrayed Naboo as a blue planet filled with green vegetation. All things considered, Parizeau’s LEGO rendition of this Star Wars universe building is quite unique. It will definitely be great to see more fictional architecture brought to us by the brick in the future.

A fleet favorite in microscale

Star Wars starships can come in all scales and sizes especially when built out of LEGO. Ron McPhatty demonstrates this concept of size variation in his digital microscale LEGO build of the Ghost, the premier starship of the rebel fleet piloted by the fierce Hera Syndulla.

The most interesting thing about this particular model is that the interior space is fleshed out. Most microscale models do not have interiors, while the Microfighters that LEGO offers just include a seat to place an out-of-scale minifigure in. Continue reading →

Morning is for tea and contemplation

Summer is winding down and where I live the trees are already starting to change color just a little bit. The morning light hits the leaves in such a way that is similarly portrayed in this built LEGO vignette by Instagram user architeclego.

Looking at this vignette, I can smell the crisp autumn air and even feel a light breeze hitting my face like on a chilly but sunny morning in late September or early October. Architeclego makes use of many different plant pieces such as the tree limb element and even some LEGO pumpkins and logs to create this peaceful fall scene. Hopefully this little vignette will help the less autumn-inclined folks mentally prepare for the beginning of a new season.

The Mandalorian Mudhorn Showdown

With new LEGO Star Wars Mandalorian goodies finally making their way to store shelves this season, scenes from the popular streaming series are becoming easier to recreate. Builder Kevin on the other hand recreates an iconic and perhaps more difficult scene to remake out of some unusual LEGO elements.

While Kevin renders the terrain of the planet Arvala-7 pretty simply using plates and tiles, the most eye-catching components of this build are the creatures included; the Mudhorn as well as the child. The body of the mudhorn can be broken down into two segments: the brick-built head and the rest of the body which creatively makes use of the LEGO mammoth element. The most striking parts utilized in the mudhorn head build would be the 1×1 round tiles with eye prints and the grey claw shaft used for the horn.

Read on to see the brilliant model of The Child in more detail