They may only come in a few varieties, but LEGO’s Mixel eyes have triggered a surge in “character builds” over the past couple of years. And while I tend to use a Sharpie for my character’s eyes, Mixel eyes still offer many creative possibilities. Combined with some creative use of handlebar and wing pieces, this fully poseable drunk business man by Swiss builder Bricking Dave is probably the most entertaining example I’ve seen in a while. No office cubicle should be without one!
Here’s an excellent scale model of a classic kick scooter by Piotr Machalski. It’s not exactly one-to-one scale and probably isn’t safe to ride. But it does fold up, and Piotr came up with a neat approach to the wheels:
Beautiful LEGO: Wild! is the third title in a series of best-selling coffee table books by Mike Doyle. Like its predecessors Beautiful LEGO and Beautiful LEGO 2: Dark, this edition features a carefully curated collection of LEGO creations by some of the community’s top builders.
Compared to its hefty hard-backed cousin DARK, this slimmer book is more reminiscent of the original Beautiful LEGO. Like DARK, its builder profiles are kept to a minimum and the focus is squarely on the photographs. Otherwise the format is the same, with images organized into categories and carefully labelled with info such as title, builder, year and part count.
To differentiate each new volume from the last, Mike has chosen to assign them over-arching themes. And while DARK was ambiguous enough to allow for a pretty diverse range of builds, WILD is necessarily more constrained to subject matter in some way related to plants, animals or nature. And since it doesn’t feature any of the nature-themed builds already used in the first two books, sections like the ones on bugs and dragons end up relying on some slightly less polished builds than readers of the earlier books might be used to seeing.
The name Notre Dame may be most widely associated with a certain cathedral in Paris, France. But the cathedral of Notre Dame is Strasbourg (also in France) is actually more than twice as tall. In fact for over two centuries it was the tallest building in the world – taller even than the Great Pyramid of Giza – eventually being surpassed in the Victorian era by such behemoths as the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument. But it still remains one of the finest surviving examples of late Gothic architecture, and is nicely captured here in microscale LEGO form by Daniel Stoeffler.
Almost ten years after his previous foray into the middle east, mysterious artist/activist Banksy recently popped up in the Gaza Strip, in an effort to once again highlight the plight of people in this region. Flickr member TheBrickAvenger was inspired to recreate one of the Gaza pieces in LEGO:
Some LEGO “purists” may scoff at the choice of the stacked bricks technique used here. But hey, maybe the builder was using it to make a statement? Or maybe there was literally no other way to create this image convincingly at mini-fig scale. Either way, the result is impressive – especially when you consider the effort it must have taken! For context, here is a photo of the original:
Looking like something right out of LEGO’s own Architecture series, this microscale model of the iconic statue of Christ The Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro is the work of German builder Jens Ohrndorf. Proportioning, detail and texture are hard to get right at this scale (especially with a human figure) but Jens nails it, and the result is immediately recognizable.
Every so often we come across LEGO versions of iconic album* covers, although more often than not they’re unconvincingly recreated using mini-figs. So it was refreshing to see umamen take a crack at some fully brick-built ones:
Pictured above: Nevermind by Nirvana (1991). One Step Behyond by Madness (1979). London Calling by The Clash (1979).
Album covers represent an absolute gold mine of immediately recognizable material for possible LEGO treatments. If you’re a builder, why not take a crack at some of your favorites – we’d love to see what you can do!
(*Album: How your parents got their music before iTunes)
We’ve see plenty of LEGO mosaics before, but this one has a twist. James Pegrum used LEGO to capture the archaeological discovery of a Roman floor mosaic. This is a teaser for a Romano-Celtic themed collaboration by British building collective Bricks to the Past, due to be unveiled at STEAM next month. Can’t wait to see what other gems are unearthed when the full display is revealed!
Scruffy-looking son of a nerfherder umamen has been continuing his series of Star Wars themed character builds. But unlike his 8″ tall Chewbacca and Stormtrooper figures, this latest series are a mere 5″ tall – practically action figure sized. So if you showed up a bit late to the stores on Force Friday, maybe you can take a leaf out of his book and craft your own instead! The level of detail, clever part usage, and pose-ability in these is quite amazing…
The most recent round of Iron Builder certainly did not disappoint, with contestants Tim Schwalfenberg and Matt De Lanoy utilizing the silver barbell ‘seed part’ to produce more than 50 builds between them over the space of just 4 weeks, as well as engaging in some traditional pun-centric smack talk! We’ve covered some of those builds already, but let’s take a look at a few we missed, this time from Tim…
August has ended, and that means the latest bout of Iron Builder is now in the hands of the judges. We saw an exciting month long build-off between American title holder Matt De Lanoy and young Canadian challenger Tim Schwalfenberg. The fight produced some epic creations, many of which we’ve been covering along the way. So while we wait to see who emerges victorious, let’s enjoy some more of the entries, starting in this post with Matt’s…
The much anticipated movie Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice is still 7 months away, but Tommy Williamson and his crew at BrickNerd Studios (the team that did the animation for the recent LEGO Brickumentary) have wasted no time in producing a follow-up to their earlier LEGO Batman vs Superman brickfilm. So without further ado, here is…
Now animation of this quality requires time and money to make. To that end, they have just started a pledge drive to fund future BrickNerd projects and activities. And as a token of their appreciation, lucky pledgers will be eligible to receive one-of-a-kind LEGO trinkets from BrickNerd Studios …including the batmobile featured in both films!