About Luka

Luka is a Slovenian LEGO builder and a member of Kocke Klub. He is most well known for building dragons, but does not shy away from other themes when time is right. In the community he goes by Deus "Big D." Otiosus (D. stands for "Destiny") and has been around for quite a few years. He is one of those builders who went through their life without a dark age. Besides LEGO he is a biology student that wastes a lot of time in the local forest or in interesting urban areas. MOC Pages Flickr Bricksafe Youtube

Posts by Luka

A meme has fallen into art in LEGO City!

We have featured artistic builds by the enigmatic builder why.not? on the Brothers Brick before. Her builds tend to focus on horror and mystery with an emotional sub-theme. The latest one mostly falls into these categories, but… A man has fallen into the river in LEGO City! Now I know it might be a coincidence, but this meme is huge right now. If this is a commentary on how powerless and alone a single person feels in the city, it makes for a great art piece. But if this is a full-effort build dedicated to a LEGO meme, I respect it too. Because memes are the purest form of contemporary art.

untitled

The build is presented to be open to interpretation and is in its essence a full LEGO scene of a minifig falling off a bridge. The focus seems to be on the aforementioned bridge, as it is the only element that is not monochromatic. The forced perspective is achieved with different scales of buildings, a small bridge in the background and a tapering curved river bank. I like the cold colours used that evoke a depressing and suffocating city atmosphere, but I wonder if it would not look better with a vivid coloured minifig, directing the attention immediately to itself.

The contrast of water and sandstone

I love it when builders follow a story through their LEGO creations over the course of years. One such story is the adventure of Jimmy and Bill, by Eli Willsea. Each build has a similar style and atmosphere, but works perfectly well as a standalone scene. The most recent one was featured here in 2017, but the first scene was built way back in 2015! Now that is dedication!

Deeper

The builder has titled this scene “Deeper” and his description only states; “further than ever before”. Indeed, Eli has gone further with his textures, details, composition and lighting. Notice the dark tan Bucket handles stuck into the bottoms of 1×2 bricks and the bars slotted in between two 1×2 bricks with center grooves, in particular. The composition really pops with the circular hole and with the waterfall flowing cleanly into it. This water was a topic of discussion between friends and me; they said it was much simpler than the surrounding textures, while I thought the smooth surface makes a nice contrast, complimenting the drab colours already present. To end the debate, I decided to ask the builder personally. Eli stated; “The water is also one of the main elements that is progressing the story of this series, that is why it stands out so much. The explorers are following the water, but the reason is so far a mystery. So yes it was a conscious decision.”

The migration that gave the Romans migraines

If you like history and LEGO, Hunter Erickson is a builder you need to check out. His most recent build represents a violent slice of the late years of the ancient Roman empire. The builder gives a very detailed description on Flickr, so make sure you check it out.

Völkerwanderung 375-476 A.D.

Besides being very well posed in an immersive battle scene, the minifigs are quite realistic in their design. The little autumn forest on the other side of the diorama is more than just a background though — if you look closely, you can see it serves as cover for a handful of Germanic archers. And the trees are quite well built as well!

A rural office location for a different kind of paperwork

Brick or human, when you need to go, you need to go. We humans have a place to go around every corner (the less hygienic take “every corner” a bit too literally though), but the plastic brick people have a much harder time to find an outhouse. Or at least they would, if SuckMyBrick had not built this outstanding LEGO outhouse.

Outhouse 1

The build is visually simple, well photographed and composed. The ramshackle style is captured perfectly with tiles pointing in angles just odd enough to not be 90 degrees and the front door uses a few closely related colours to give a fading impression – but according to the builder, the creation is not as fragile as it looks. The base completes the build with details like fragrant flowers in the back and curved slopes that really add to the cartoony style.

Spiky is a sore loser

I have not been uploading much in terms of LEGO on the internet for the past few months. This was partly because I have not been building much, but also because I did not really photograph or edit much of what I did build. This situation is a bit different from the previous builds in that I got a (in my opinion) neat idea that I knew I could build quickly and wanted to share with the community as soon as I could. The result was Spiky‘s “racing” mech, inspired by the LEGO Racers 2 video game. Some may call LEGO Xalax Racers one of the worst themes of all time (and its place in LEGO history during the company’s worst financial years may be more than just a coincidence), but I loved it. Although I see it through rose-tinted glasses, I believe the theme had redeeming qualities in its unique figures and in tying closely into LEGO Racers 2.

Spiky is a sore loser

-Click to see another photo of the mech and read a little about the building process!>

Escape the mecha and spaceships of our society and build a cabin in the woods

Inspired by the book Walden; or Life in the Woods, Andrea Lattanzio escapes from the fast food restaurants and gas stations (and futuristic rovers!) of the modern world into the wilds through his latest build. I wonder if Thoreau, the main character of the aforementioned book, would choose LEGO as his outlet instead of escaping to the wild if he had lived in modern time?

Walden; or, Life in the Woods

The diorama captures everything a self-sufficient cabin in the woods would have (including a bit of the woods). The textures and little imperfections on the cabin capture the hand-crafted appearance very well, most notably the tiles on the roof pressed down only half way and the window with a half-plate offset in its top and bottom halves. The pine trees are done quite well, with leaf elements placed at convincing angles on the central axis. The use of the old tree stump piece adds a lot to the atmosphere, as do the inspired choices of gray homemaker hair part as a stone and brown stud shooters in the dead tree on the right side of the diorama.

You are not prepared! (for this LEGO Illidan Stormrage from World of Warcraft)

A cornerstone of gaming, the role-playing online game World of Warcraft, has recently had a resurgence. The re-release of its original form (before seven expansions) has had millions hooked, me including. I guess that explains my lack of activity in the LEGO world… But while everybody else is busy killing boars and growing out their hair, Chi Hsin Wei has been building. The result is Illidan Stormrage, one of the central characters in the Warcraft storyline.

Illidan Stormrage

The character is obviously instantly recognizable, with the torn wings, green demonic tattoos and his weapons, the warglaives of Azzinoth built using lime green dragon wings. The muscles of the upper body are quite impressive, as is the construction of the character’s pants that look like they have not been changed for ten thousand years…

A little thought about big spaceships...along with a big spaceship

Large spaceships get the geeky type quite excited, and we LEGO builders are some of the geekiest. Over the decades, this has lead to a standardized criteria of what qualifies as a large space ship – 100 studs in length. While I do love every large spaceship out there (as the especially geeky type of person I am), I wonder if this criteria has started to impede creativity. With an annual celebration of large LEGO spaceships (also known as SHIPs) every September, the bricks of the world have been concentrated to bring us many elongated spacecraft that quite often measure exactly or just over 100 LEGO studs long. What about bulkier 90 or 80-stud spaceships that so rarely get made? On the other side of the coin, this cultural phenomenon has been a great source of inspiration to builders who may not have otherwise built a big hunk of space metal, not even a medium sized one! Another point is that this common perception of what qualifies as “large” is a uniting factor in the community.

Pelicon-3

The third side of this (apparently three-sided) coin are builds that are basically the definition of an elongated spaceship, but still manage to impress immensely! Anthony Wilson brings us a creation that has some amazing textures, negative space and colour blocking. What I love most about Anthony’s Pelicon-3 is the bridge area, with windows on either side, revealing a busy interior filled with trophy minifigures.

An urban adventurer’s playground

Abandoned factories seem to divide people into two camps: those who for some reason find them beautiful, and those who think such structures should be demolished as quickly as possible. Such locations attract all sorts of people, from graffiti artists to homeless people and edgy teenagers looking for adventure. Dutch LEGO builder and photographer Niek Geurts probably isn’t homeless, and I doubt he is an edgy teenager. Judging by his photography website, he seems to be inspired by abandoned industrial architecture, and his recent LEGO recreation of an abandoned factory is filled with all the functional details one would expect in a factory.

Abandoned old factory, lego MOC

The scene has just about everything you could ask for. There is a little guard house, a railroad access, all sorts of hoses and air vents on the roof and other must-haves for any factory, abandoned or not. There are a few characteristics of abandoned buildings as well; broken windows, graffiti (wonderfully brick-built examples here!), cracked pavement and uncontrollable vegetation sprouting everywhere, including a bit of moss on the roof. The two bikes on the left side of the diorama are either stolen and discarded or the property of whoever is filming clickbait YouTube videos inside…

Precise, clean cuts. No one saw anything. Again.

The world of Magic: the Gathering is, despite its cheap fantasy storyline, a treasure trove of characters and other motives. Some (far too few, if you ask me!) LEGO builders like Eero Okkonen take inspiration from it and create amazing works of art. This recreation of The Wanderer is a great example of a builder capturing the original artwork perfectly. The Wanderer is a clichéd mysterious character in the lore that would be quite interesting if it was in any other story.

The Wanderer

The build is mostly what one would expect from this master character builder. The real highlight is the incredible accuracy to the source material. The exotic colours like pink, gold and sand green are not the easiest to work with in LEGO, but Eero stretched his collection to the limit and successfully recreated the character, with all her challenges. The most interesting part usage to me was the Technic figure scuba flipper used as the ends of the hair. To read more about the building process, check out Eero’s own blog post on Cyclopic bricks.

Life from the ashes, like a leafy kind of phoenix

In a world where human influence seems more and more destructive, it can sometimes feel like there is less hope for life every passing day. Patrick Biggs tackles this topic with an expressive character that seems to embody wild plant life. Now, we should not oversimplify the ecological crisis to just deforestation, but as a symbol this creation is quite powerful. It may be a touch ironic to talk about such problems through plastic bricks, but if it makes just one person consider their carbon or plastic footprint, the world is better for it.

The Gardener

The character’s leafy face has a perfect shape and an expression achieved by two simple pin holes. The body has much more detail than I would expect from brown. But the character would not have the impact it does without the burnt stump it is presented on, as well as the flowers sprouting from said stump under the gardener’s influence.

A dragon that is also a crane and an excavator and a wrecking ball and...

So I have been building again. This one was quite a stress-free build, inspired by my other recent dragon, Dragon Unit LL-32167. I was struck by a moment of inspiration about a month ago and realized that I have a yellow 24-toothed gear that would work perfectly in the dragon’s neck. The thought process continued with the idea that if I build a dragon using no light gray and (almost) no blue, I could keep the previous one assembled for a longer time. This means that everyone visiting my tiny local LEGO shows/conventions may have a chance at seeing the two mecha dragons side-by-side. I name this awesome construction worker mecha dragon Workhorse.

Click here to read more about my latest build and a comparison with my earlier similar build