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

He Xaingu offers improved health and a sound mind

When we featured Cindy Su’s compelling Zhongli Quan figure, she clued us in that he was the first of the legendary Eight Immortals from Chinese mythology that she would build. Now we are enthralled all over again with this lovely He Xaingu figure who is here with her lotus flower to improve our mental and physical health. Her uplifting presence and her healing powers are much appreciated right about now.

Friends sets offer a much more feminine color pallet than your standard LEGO fare and Cindy demonstrates just how lovely that can be. Whether building a car fender, hot air balloon or, in this case, a lotus flower, these parts are proving to be an integral addition to anyone’s LEGO collection. We will patiently await the arrival of Cindy’s other six Immortals from Chinese mythology. In the meantime you can learn more.

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Meet me down by the shipyard for some good old antifouling!

Having spent a few years at sea, KMBricklab has stirred my olfactory bulb and amygdala with this shipyard diorama. Those are the two parts of the brain responsible for nostalgia, and mine are tingling something fierce with memories of briny air, seagulls squalling, and a quick welder’s spark. Dry dock is the only time to see a vessel in it’s full glory and often it can seem both mighty and vulnerable. This old fishing cutter is getting some much needed antifouling of its hull.

Click to see more of this detailed maritime scene.

They fly now? They fly now.

I don’t want to spoil much for you if you haven’t yet seen Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but the main takeaway from this scene by flambo14 is that they fly now. When do spoilers become common knowledge? A brief internet search proves this can be a shifting and nebulous answer but the overall consensus is it’s frowned upon to spoil anything while said movie is still actively in theaters but should be fair game after that. For example; Darth Vader is Luke’s father, Bruce Willis was dead all along and the chick in The Crying Game is totally a dude. If these revelations spoiled anything for you then you fall into the “God help you” category and really should get out more. However, as to what flies now and why, we’re going to remain as vague as an Ikea instruction manual at least for a few more weeks.

You can make yours fly now with this set. Here is our review on the matter.

This sweet ride will soon be an official giveaway set!

There’s something about a 50s era car that gives me a deep sense of longing for a time and a place that I was never a part of. Well, it turns out so many others share in this notion. The term for that is not nostalgia but rather… anemoia. Versteinert likely knows what I mean as evidenced by this fabulously 50s convertible. The good news for anyone not a sexagenarian but still in love with that 50s style is this ride was the grand prize winner in the LEGO Ideas contest and will soon be an official Gift with Purchase set. Details as to exactly when and which sets you’d need to purchase haven’t been released yet, but our not-too-distant future is looking bright!

Contest rules state that any entry would need to be a generic design. I say “generic” meaning no particular model or brand, but I’m seeing a little bit of ’59 Impala, little bit of ’57 Chevy Bel Air, little bit of Ford, little bit of Cadillac and all things that make my heart go pitter-patter. The ice skate blade hood ornament is inspired, and the Dagmars (named after this actress) on the bumper are an excellent touch, but the pièce de résistance would have to be these surfboards. It would seem giving us all a sense of anemoia just might be this builder’s thing. Here’s a prior time we featured his vintage Chevy truck.

A mythical fox of a different kind

Can someone help me with a tech question? How do I set the parental controls so that my parents can’t watch Fox News? While The Brothers Brick IT team and I are working that out, I’d like to show you a fox of a different kind. This Kyuubi no Kitsune (Nine-tailed Fox) built by Jessica Farrell is a well-known character in Japanese folklore. Jessica tells us that this magical creature lives for an incredibly long time and grows a new tail for each century of spiritual training and wisdom. Upon gaining its ninth tail, the Kitsune has reached its full powers and its tails may begin to turn golden or white in color. Its natural form is that of an ordinary fox but the powerful Kitsune is able to shape-shift into other forms, particularly that of a beautiful young woman, and get up to all sorts of mischief!

She also tells us that this model is comprised of 4,304 elements and took three weeks to design and build. I am particularly fond of the intricate textured stones and the flowing brook. The entire setting instills a tranquil feeling for me and the Kitsune’s expression exudes wisdom. Now that is a Fox network I would watch!

This wouldn’t be the first time we were enchanted by Jessica’s mythical beings. Check out this dragon and an uncanny walking house.

A Star Wars post sure to make you “Mad About Me”.

Let’s face it, you can’t get that jaunty, upbeat tune out of your head now. I know it, you know it and builder Minicoop4 knows it. The best thing to do is just ride it out and maybe re-watch Star Wars. These five Jizz-wailers (tee-hee!) are so good at playing that one tune that it’s the only request they ever get. Trust me, I’d love to keep sputtering out the lowbrow jokes real thick here but any innuendos I may have had in mind were already exhausted by the world’s most important news source so you’ll get no more jokes from me.

Some neat facts about the song though; it commonly goes by the Cantina Band Song but it’s actually called “Mad About Me”. The band of Bith aliens is called Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes, but if you want it played at your wedding, you’d have to credit composer John Williams. If you want to audition for the band, be sure to have a black turtleneck and a snappy pair of gray slacks. It also helps if you have cleavage showing. Forehead cleavage, that is. OK, maybe I had one dumb joke left!

Red Sonja is a thing of dreams from a much evolved builder

For folks like me, building people and other bipedal figures can be a bit difficult. I’d build them fine enough, but even the slightest shift in weight could result in a fragile creation toppling over, so often it’s just easier to build them with both feet planted firmly on steady ground. The end result is a little stiff but at least we’re not cleaning up a toppled LEGO mess. But Letranger Absurde has built plenty of human figures. Even his own humbler beginnings were admittedly a little rigid, but we are witnessing a great builder evolving into a greater one, as evidenced by this Red Sonja creation. Her proportions and fluidity of motion are suitable enough to grace a Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo fantasy illustration. The builder tells us that this is indeed his most difficult creation to date but the end result is absolutely worth the effort.

Here is another recent creation that illustrates how well this builder is evolving.

The cheese stands alone

We’ll soon return you to your regularly scheduled Baby Yoda or Star Wars spaceship or whatever you folks are demanding more of but first I wanted to show you this cute near life-sized rat built by Keiichi Kamei. The rats that occasionally invade my backyard are a bit bigger than this but his stance, his little ears, his bare tail and even his hands are all pretty spot on. I’d be more agreeable to sharing some cheese with them if they weren’t so invasive in real life.

This is not quite instructions but you can sort of reverse engineer your own with the help of this photo. Neat, right? We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

For Baby Yoda, wackadoodle, the internet has gone.

Builder Miro Dudas knows that the formula for success is to build Baby Yoda or anything from The Mandalorian, really. I have not yet seen the pivotal series from Disney+ but in gleaning from the official trailer, internet memes, and prior TBB articles about The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda, I’ll try to surmise the plot of the entire series. Here goes:

(any spoilers are purely coincidental)

Click to see if I’m right!

Greebling with a side of more greebling!

It finally happened! This new creation by Angelo Favretti has me at a loss for words. So instead of coming up with the words you can fill them all in Mad Libs style and post them in the comments section.

This (adjective) spaceship is totally the (possessive noun) knees! I like how it is divided into (a number) sections, each more (adjective) than the last. I’m willing to wager my (noun) that this took a metric (unit of measure) of time and LEGO to complete. We’re all (adverb) blown away by the amount of (verb ending in “ing”) greebling this thing has! It’s like a (noun) exploded in (a place) and this is the (adjective) result. I think the gray (plural noun) and the white (plural noun) are (adverb) nice parts usage. (Brothers Brick staff member) says this might be the (adjective ending in “est”) spaceship we’ve seen all year and (famous person) just might agree. Let’s hope for more (adjective) (plural noun) like this in 2020!

A midnight snack and a dip in the pool sounds good right about now.

The premise of Gremlins was to never expose these adorable Mogwai to bright light, never get them wet and never, ever feed them after midnight. But how do they know what time zone they’re in? Plus it’s always midnight somewhere so did they take that into consideration? They broke the rules anyway and drama ensued but in the 80’s you didn’t really need cohesive plots to make a movie watchable. All you needed was Phoebe Cates. Grantmasters proves you don’t need a ton of LEGO to recreate a pretty convincing facsimile of Gizmo, the adorable star of Gremlins who wasn’t Phoebe Cates.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

This holiday season, Star Wars fans are flocking to movie theaters to see the final installment in the Skywalker saga. Since Star Wars came out in 1977, we’ve grown older, some of us have had kids of our own, some have bought homes, held more than a few jobs, some of us may even be looking as old and grizzled as Luke Skywalker himself. No matter how we turned out in life, Star Wars fans who were children or young adults in 1977 recall the year that changed their lives immesuably. An entity named NS Brick Designs has sparked a sense of wonder and nostalgia for older Star Wars fans with a LEGO rendition of the original Tom Jung pulp poster that started it all.

Luke’s robe billows open revealing his massively muscled chest while a subservient, sultry Leia slinks at his feet holding a blaster. This wasn’t the reality of the movie; Luke wasn’t all that ripped and it turns out Princess Leia could hold her own and wasn’t going to play second fiddle to a farm boy from Tatooine. But pulp images, especially this one inspired by the fantasy art of Frank Frazetta, have a way of capturing the imagination and bending perceptions a bit. Now in modern times, we are calling the newest movie the last of the Skywalker saga, but we have new heroes to look up to such as Finn, Rey and Poe. Thanks to a dedicated fan base and thanks, in part, to images like this one, the magic and lore of Star Wars has persisted with us most of our lives and will likely remain with us for generations to come.