About Lino

Lino is an artist, humorist, and occasional responsible adult. He is the co-founder of a challenge-based LEGO car club called LUGNuts which boasts over 1100 members worldwide. He proposed automotive building challenges every month for ten years (120 challenges!) which he and the other members built accordingly. LUGNuts has retired its challenges on its 10th anniversary but still remains a cornerstone for LEGO automotive builders. Between his artistic work and LEGO builds, Lino has been published in several books, including Beautiful LEGO, Beautiful LEGO: Dark, and Beautiful LEGO: Wild. He lives in Washington with his girlfriend and dogs.

Posts by Lino

A dragon GBC among the clouds

So what’s a GBC, then? It stands for Great Ball Contraption and, despite the cringe-worthy connotations that name implies, GBC is often a crowd pleaser at LEGO conventions. It’s a mechanical means of moving one or many balls from one location to another. This particular GBC by Andreas Lenander is a feat of engineering with an artful approach. The charming dragon makes a wave pattern as orange balls move through the clouds.

It truly is a captivating work of art to behold. I wish there was some kind of way you can see it in motion. It turns out you can with this short video! Stay toward the end to see the inner workings that give this dragon its hypnotic wave motion.

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Social greeting between two angels

The odd scenario before you is a new LEGO creation featuring seraphim and cherubim by Haoming Qiu called “Social greeting between two angels”. I imagine the dark one says “Howdy do! I’m all dark and brooding and stuff”. Meanwhile the other angel is like, “Sup, brah? As hideous as I am, I’m actually a biblically accurate angel”. Then the dark one is like “cool, brah!” At least that’s my interpretation of the story. The builder didn’t offer any other clues. Let us know in the comments if you have a different dialogue for this admittedly fantastic pair.

The final dragon from The Year of the Dragon

In the waning hours of 2024, Joss Ivanwood presented his final LEGO dragon for his Year of the Dragon project and it’s a doozy of a deer. Draconis Cervus takes inspiration from fallow and sika deer with their reddish nougat-colored fur and white underbellies. Joss tells us that the furry parts he has been using in this series are quickly becoming his favorite pieces but he takes particular pride with how the eyes turned out, which makes use of a Technic tow-ball inserted into a gray Mixel socket. What a lovely and satisfying end to an equally satisfying project! I look forward to whatever Joss will be doing in 2025. In the meantime, be sure to check out our Joss Ivanwood archives to discover highlights from the Year of the Dragon project and even older offerings from previous years.

TBB’s top 10 LEGO creations of 2024 [Feature]

Adult LEGO builders are an amazing and imaginative lot. While most who buy LEGO are happy with building sets as per the instructions and calling it a day, an elite bunch take it a step further when they create from scratch. While opinions may vary, we’ve crunched numbers, done some analytics stuff and came up with The Brothers Brick top 10 creations of 2024 based on views. Without further ado, here’s what you came for.

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The Christmas good, the bad, and the ...huh?

LEGO builder Kristel Whitaker presents a sweet little Christmas vignette of a reindeer barn. First we have the good, thich is getting to pet a baby reindeer. Very nice! Next is the bad, which is having to scoop the poopy. I wonder what that elf did to get on the naughty list. Finally we have the…ugly? The funny? The weird? We’re not too sure how to categorize this one but Santa is napping on the roof with what appears to be a liquor bottle and a pizza. There’s no judgements here. We’ve all been there, right?

This is sort of tangentially Christmas-related but here is another vignette that we noticed earlier this month of Mrs.Gingerbread baking some delicious heart cookies. Perhaps they’re laced with a little something extra, which could explain why Santa is napping on the roof.

Traveling tonics were once upon a time in a dream

Sometimes great ideas arise when you combine unrelated materials from diverse sources. That’s what is at play here with Isaac Wilder’s latest LEGO creation called Tabitha’s Traveling Tonics. He tells us his fiance was playing Fables III and within the game are these neat caravans. So naturally, he decided to try one of his own. He used the wise and diminutive Mrs. Castillo from the DreamZzz line, specifically the Turtle Van set as Tabitha. A reindeer and snow was added to his idea to create a rather dreamy wintery scene. Stir in a fanciful caravan wagon, a few unearthly light sources, and a dash of magic and you have yourselves a cure for foot fungus and a bevy of love potions; all delivered to you post haste!

All aboard the Parisian subway!

There’s a lot to love in this LEGO Parisian subway built by Renaud Petit. The “Miniland” and “LEGO Shop” signs tell me this is my stop and I should get out and explore a bit. I particularly like the extremely Parisian man with his typical French striped shirt, French neckerchief, French bread, French beret, and French bulldog. He’s looking disparagingly at a sleeping French hobo, which I believe is a clochard in French. I don’t know if this is a cultural thing or not but everyone in this composition seems a bit upset. Perhaps everyone needs a good French press coffee and a croissant to take the edge off?

Draconis Scyphozoa – a jellyfish-inspired dragon

LEGO phenom Joss Ivanwood has been building a dragon every month in 2024; Year of the Dragon in case you’re wondering why. It turns out, eleven months into the year, this jellyfish-inspired dragon marks the first instance of creative block. It’s quite understandable, trying to design a dragon based on a jellyfish; I imagine there were several iterations of this magnificent beast, several head-scratching moments and maybe sleepless nights. But the end result is probably my favorite of the entire line. I mean, look at those tendrils made from legions of clips and that arching transparent bell. It’s proof that something can be deadly and beautiful all at the same time. Joss tells us that while he’s aware that jellyfish don’t have brains, he couldn’t resist including the new brain creature piece from the Mindflayer D&D minifigure. That’s a smart use for that brain piece!

This Star Wars Ewok Village can topple an empire

Back in 2013 LEGO produced the 10236 Ewok Village and at the time it was the first large Star Wars set that wasn’t a spaceship. It was a popular set, likely the pinnacle of Star Wars playsets at the time. Now, eleven years later, Simulterious takes inspiration from that pivotal set but doesn’t stop there; he also borrows some design cues from The Kenner Playset from 1983. If many of our readers are like me, this should hit several nostalgic sweet spots simultaneously. Or should I say…simulteriously? Whether your favorite inspiration was the 2013 LEGO set, the 1983 Kenner playset or neither because you can’t wrap your head around the concept of cute cannibalistic care bears toppling an entire galactic empire, then you have to at least admire the the amazing build techniques on display here.

“You’ve always been the caretaker, Mr. Torrence”

A thing that Alex Eylar does really well with his LEGO creations is set a mood. Sometimes, often actually, that mood can be deeply unsettling. You don’t need to read the title to know this is an iconic scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Here we see an already deranged and inebriated Jack Torrence taking family advice from a ghostly Delbert Grady. The advice in question was chilling and unwholesome, even for 1980 standards; and let’s just say nothing went well for anybody. It turns out this wasn’t the only deeply unsettling bathroom scene in the movie. Alex, if you go on to build the nightmare fuel that was the green bathroom, I’m pretty sure I’ll be damaged goods forever.

Ringing in Autumn with some hot proboscis action

On the calendar and in accordance with dropping temperatures around here, Autumn is being shown the door by Old Man Winter. However, in Mattia Careddu‘s world, Autumn is just arriving as evidenced by their latest LEGO creation. Here we see a dynamic duo; first up is the red spider lily (Lycoris radiata), the Japanese flower that symbolizes the arrival of Autumn. Next on the docket is what appears to be a hummingbird but it’s Macroglossum stellatarum, a kind of moth called the hummingbird hawkmoth that behaves exactly like a hummingbird. I’ve found the hummingbirds around my feeders to be hyper-intense, territorial, and belligerent toward one another so, in this regard, some people also act like hummingbirds. This duo is doing birds and bees stuff. If you haven’t yet been made privy to “the talk” I advise you ask someone else. Or Google it.

The builder is no stranger to life-size flowers and unusual insects. We also like this Sri Lankan duo.

To boldly go... and sometimes not come back

In a Star Trek world of Enterprises and Klingon Birds of Prey, sometimes it’s the little ships that mean a lot. Take this LEGO Shuttlecraft built by Horace Worblehat for example. It’s expertly crafted and certainly takes me back to classic Star Trek episodes. This little craft has taken these two crewmembers to parts unknown. What will harangue them next? Will it be a ferocious Gorn or a hideous Salt Vampire? One thing for certain is one of these guys will escape by the skin of their teeth and the other will die a horrible yet amusing death. It’s the Redshirt, by the way. It’s always the Redshirt.