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

The fabulous land of bright colours and warfare

The bright colours, cartoony style of pieces and cute anthropomorphic animal characters of Fabuland make for a perfect nostalgic base to build on. And boy do LEGO fans build on it! Here at The Brothers Brick, we have featured over the years fabuland Star Wars, pirates, The Hobbit and even Black Fantasy and Apocalyptic Fabuland. Zilmrud brings another theme to the collection with his over-the-top futuristic military creations sporting the cute characters in completely inappropriate settings. What would Ole Kirk Kristiansen say!

For the glory of Fabuland

The builder combines cute DUPLO and Fabuland elements with an excessive amount of weaponry, with civilians in the background cheering the armed Fabuland forces. There are many iconic pieces included in the build, like original fabuland doors, windows and even benches! Of course it can hardly be a Fabuland creation without the figures and the bulldog fireman in the tank actually looks like a strangely appropriate choice… The below photo of a bunny mech stealing eggs is especially timely. The style of this one is more tailored to the bunny Fabuland figure than the theme as a whole, but still captures both the feeling of the original theme and what we are used to in mecha. The “chicken’s” nest is particularly inspired, using a DUPLO cupcake cup containing small shrub pieces as the nest’s material.

Egg Hunting Bunny Mech

What does it take to transform grey clouds into colourful butterflies?

We have featured a beautiful LEGO creation of grey butterflies gaining colour by Dario Minisini before. Now the builder returns to the theme with this meaningful build of grey clouds being turned into a rainbow-coloured butterfly.

Let the colors go out from your heart

I just love Dario’s style of butterflies, as well as the multiple smaller ones. Some of the partially formed butterflies really give an impression of movement. The builder does not provide much of a description, but the message seems quite clear from the title: “Let the colors go out from your heart”.

Getting to the pressing matter at hand

It is not intuitive, but this little article and the whole internet is really a direct consequence of the first press. German builder Michael Jasper recreates this monumental part of his national (and global) history in a build that can fit in one’s hand, and yet packs more detail than many larger builds.

Gutenberg Printing Press

There are not many names that have been so consistently present at the peak of the crop in the online LEGO community over the past decades, but Michael Jasper is surely one of them. Known for using exotic parts in unique ways, he does not disappoint this time either. Can you find the brown 2×2 magnet holder tile and the brown bar with side studs? The cutest detail for me though, is how the bed holding the “letters” slides between two panel pieces. But Michael does not stop there! The tiny press actually has moving parts, as seen in the little story below!

Gutenberg Printing Press

Try to understand the gravity of the situation

Classic Space seems to be in a boom recently, probably due to the recent re-release of classic space minifigures in the 70841 Benny’s Space Squad set. This gives us quite a few opportunities to share amazing Classic Space builds to share here on the Brothers Brick, including scenes, rovers and mecha. A big fan of Classic Space, Andreas Lenander gives us an immersive piece of action in this beautifully lit all-LEGO scene titled “Gravity failure at Epsilon IV.” It uses the brand-new pink classic spacesuit.

Gravity failure at Epsilon IV

Click to explore more areas of the Epsilon IV base

Dragon unit LL-32167

I always wanted to make a mecha dragon, even as far back as 2012 when I fell in love with LEGO dragons. I always knew it would be gray and greebly, but it almost seemed like cheating. Light gray is the LEGO colour with most the available detail pieces, so it would make finding solutions to building problems easier than I would like them to be. Ironically, this is the most complicated dragon build I have made yet (of which there are 24 now, including some more open interpretations of what a “dragon” is). I working on building this one on and off for 2 months from late December to mid-February.

Model Obsolete, dragon unit LL-32167

Click to read about the building process and see a few extra pictures

Why not close the window at night?

If you happen to come across the obscure Flickr photostream of why.not?, you will likely be asking yourself the question “why?” more often than “why not?” The builder seems to specialize in very obviously giving her builds a message, but more often than not, the message is hard to pin down. Her latest creation is a nighttime scene of a room with an open window. This scene captures the ambiance of fresh night air so well that I can almost feel the cool breeze. It is actually so beautifully mundane that I can not help but relax and go to sleep now… Wait, nope, there are some chains on the floor and I have no idea what they are there for. No sleep tonight.

untitled

The build itself seems quite simple, with a cute city skyline in forced perspective as the background, using different shades of yellow as windows with a bit of variation, making for quite a realistic effect. I also really like the moon, built with a round tile and a white rubber band around it that gives a glowing effect. The room has a few interesting details as well, especially the little marbles on the table, which seem to be made of either levers or antennas. The handles on the windows and the door are a great idea too, using pearl gold minifig arms to achieve a very classy look.

Just cruising on the lake in my Ford Mustang

In this incredibly detailed digital build, ExeSandbox was tasked to put a 1965 Ford Mustang in beautiful scenery. I think nobody told him it was supposed to be placed on a road, but the builder just slapped it straight in the middle of the scenery. And it looks amazing! Never before has a car driving on water looked so right.

Lake Scenery (Front View)

The centerpiece of the scene is the quite accurate Ford Mustang, and it really gives the scene context. But it is the landscaping that shines here. There is a lot of simple parts that just work really well, like trees built of stacked leaf pieces or the clean layers of the ground. On the other hand, there are also very intensely textured trees with plates facing all directions and an extremely realistic lake bed covered in rocks. The water benefits the most from computer rendering, as finding this many perfectly clean translucent panels and placing them this straight without bending would be nearly impossible. What does not benefit from computer rendering is the perfect curved road though. While this technique looks beautiful and requires a proportional amount of work in real life, the builder states that it was a nightmare to do digitally, reminding us all that digital builders face their own challenges (the whole scene contains over 90,000 pieces). Often skeptics see digital builds as cheating or an easy shortcut, but the naysayers are often people who have never opened a brick-building program. And below is the final piece of art with a full background, and we can all agree that digital or not, the end result is a stunning image. And sometimes that is what matters.

Nothing Like a Ford on a Lake

Incredibly accurate U.S.S. Enterprise built from LEGO

There are many amazing Star Trek LEGO creations out there, as can be seen in our Star Trek archives. One would expect a proportional amount of average creations in the theme, but they seem to be very scarce, as if Star Trek attracts great builders like a magnet. Today’s magnetically charged builder is Kevin J. Walter, whom you might remember as the builder of a certain huge and nearly perfect Klingon Bird of Prey.

NCC-1701-A - U.S.S. Enterprise [Refit]

The build is stunning, capturing the shape of the iconic starship (especially the saucer!) perfectly, while simultaneously packing a lot of cool details. All the complex angles are done so cleanly, one would imagine the bricks were made for them. There is a moderate amount of photoshop included as well, notably the lit windows and the deflector. And if you want to put it into some context, here is a photo of the Enterprise encountering Kevin’s Bird of Prey.

NCC-1701-A - U.S.S. Enterprise [Refit]

Classic Space, roved by rovers for 40 years

Brickshelf user (yes, Brickshelf still exists) legofrik has recently built a cute boxy rover in the colours of Classic Space. He says the inspiration was a coincidental discovery that small treads fit around 6×6 dishes to create a unique wheel design.

NCS ATV

The build has a very boxy shape, and yet avoids looking rectangular and simple. The colours are not only blocked visually, but also by purpose; blue as the main bulk of the vehicle, gray for radars, hoses and other technical doodads and translucent yellow as the iconic Classic Space window and windscreen colour. The rover also has working suspension and a detailed interior.

This custom modular building is bananas!

Modular buildings, whether they’re sets or custom creations, are very popular in the LEGO fan community. They can be admired as standalone creations or as parts of larger town layouts, but there is something in every modular for every LEGO fan. Kofi says this is his first modular, but he does not seem to have struggled at all.

cc house main

The first key feature to note is that while the two adjacent houses are quite dissimilar, they feel like they fit together perfectly. A modular building is not a true modular building without clever repeated part use for architectural detail. Kofi uses clips and wedge plates for these purposes, but the real star of the show is the houses’ “accessories”, namely the drains, built using everything from medium dark flesh bread pieces to different sorts of lightsaber hilts. Look closely and you may even spot a banana.

Time to destroy dolomite

I am not a miner, but I imagine that it is not quite as fun and exciting as the 1990s Rock Raiders LEGO theme made it look. Nevertheless, I have fond memories of this action-packed adventure theme. My nostalgia was somewhat dormant for a long time, until I had the privilege to write about a Rock Raiders tunneling drone here on the Brothers Brick. The creation made me feel so good that I felt compelled had to make my own Rock Raiders-themed model. And here it is; the “Dolomite Destroyer” (named in the honour of the iconic 4940 Granite Grinder LEGO set).

Dolomite Destroyer

I have experimented with proportions a bit for this model. Just a simple colour scheme would not cut it for a Rock Raiders build. It had to be bulky and rough. The whole thing started with a Throwbot/Slizer shoulder/hand piece as the mech’s arms and continued from there. The second central part was an Atlantis minifig helmet within the body. I finished the model off with a little crane because I think cranes look so cool and industrial. While this model was fun to build, I will be scrapping it to build another creation in this style later on.

Journey to the center of the earth with this wacky drilling companion

We recently featured a tunneling drone, which was uploaded on the initiative of a year-long online mecha building project – Mech Monday. One of the builder’s sources of inspiration was Markus Rollbühler, who built this adorable drilling robot for the latest Mech Monday.

Mech Monday #12: DB-Y3 "Drillbilly"

While not overly complicated, this little guy has a bright and well-blocked colour scheme. The robot also features some unique parts like the chrome silver Rock Raiders drill piece, which is used instead of legs. With its weird and wacky expression, this is a mech any miner would love to take to work.