About Iain

Iain Heath is an avid builder specializing in the "Bricks of Character" style, which he helped define. He has been using LEGO to parody popular culture since 2007, when he created the now infamous Stephen Hawking model. He is a SeaLUG member and regular theme coordinator at BrickCon. For five years he also ran a blog called The Living Brick, that showcased the best character-based LEGO creations from around the world. You can find his irreverent body of work on Flickr.

Posts by Iain

Life’s a beach

When a certain young naturalist by the name of Charles Darwin joined the HMS Beagle on it’s historic 2nd voyage in 1831, camera photography was still something of an experimental science. So capturing a visual record of the trip was the responsibility of a ship’s artist, like Conrad Martens.

Historical LEGO scene builder James Pegrum has recreated one of Martens’ more unusual sketches from the trip, showing the Beagle beached for repairs at a spot near the mouth of the Rio Santa Cruz (Argentina).

Yes, everything in the picture – including the distant cliffs – is LEGO. James manages to combine his particular building and photographic skills to create a very life-like scene. If the trip had taken place 175 or so years later, I’m sure Martens would have tweeted an image just like this!

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Do not go gentle into that good night

Chris Nolan’s latest movie Interstellar is an epic adventure across time and space, accompanied by an equally epic and thunderous soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. It was by far the most enjoyable cinematic experience I’ve had since Nolan’s mind-bending 2010 masterpiece Inception.

It’s been fun watching various Interstallar-inspired builds emerge over the past few months, most of which – not that surprisingly – focus on the movie’s stylish Ranger spacecraft. But I think Taiwanese builder jp_velociraptor has just created the definitive version:

This is not simply a LEGO sculpture of the distinctive ship, it’s a complete play set! The model opens up to reveal a cockpit with room for all the explorers and one of their clunky robot companions (also shown below in “rescue mode”). Very impressive work indeed.

I heartily recommend that you see this movie. I won’t give anything away… but it’s as emotionally draining as it is visually and sonically mesmerizing. So I strongly suggest you bring a box of tissues with you to the movie theater ;-)

Wowsers!

“Here’s your assignment, Inspector Gadget: Use your powers of Eighties cartoon awesomeness to help Dr Clites defeat the dastardly Mayo Twins in their plot to take over the Iron Builder contest. Use the seed part in any way you can to outdo them. Bring along a small child and a talking dog, for when you inevitably get into trouble. Regards, Chief Quimby. THIS MESSAGE WILL SELF DESTRUCT.”

Fiery Phoenix

This mesmerizing Phoenix is made entirely from transparent bricks, and was created by Moko as an entry in the Click Brick 2015 Winter Original Model Contest. Starting next month, LEGO stores all across Japan will be showcasing competition entries created by local builders. One of the interesting features of this contest is that every model has to fit within a 20 stud x 20 stud wide, 30cm high space. We’ll be keeping an eye out for pictures of the best entries, and featuring them right here.

Strike and counterstrike

I suspect the ongoing HARDnuary challenge will generate many more great builds before the month is out. But as we recently revealed, there already appear to be two ‘heavy hitters’ in the ring. For his latest entry, Carl Merriam decided to build a bunch of matches. That’s right, your eyes do not deceive you… The entire scene below is made from LEGO!

But Kosmas Santosa is no slouch, and responded by playing the nostalgia card with this equally stunning recreation of a vintage cassette recorder, complete with tapes.

LEGO Movie snubbed by the Oscars, then wins Critics Choice award ...all in the same day [News]

Yesterday the 2015 Oscar nominations were announced, and The LEGO Movie was notably absent from the list of nominees for best animated feature. In response to this news, the movie’s writer and director Philip Lord tweeted “It’s okay. Made my own!” accompanied by a photo of a brick-built Oscar trophy. In reality, the uncredited creation was the work of brick artist Nathan Sawaya, although Lord did later admit that he just grabbed the image from a Google Image search.

LEGO fans everywhere were no doubt dismayed at the lack of an Oscar nod for this critically acclaimed and commercially successful movie. But later that very day, the critics themselves came to the rescue when the movie won Best Animated Film at the Critics Choice Awards!

As the saying goes… Every dark bluish gray cloud has a light bluish gray lining.

Giant LEGO Landspeeder is 3000 bricks worth of droid smuggling awesomeness

“These are not the bricks you’re looking for!” Given that this is only Aaron Fiskum‘s second build, we are very impressed. Using almost 3000 bricks and measuring about 2 feet (half a meter) in length, this Star Wars “X34” landspeeder was designed to match the scale and style of LEGO’s Ultimate Collectors Series (UCS) sets, that have become much coveted by LEGO’s more grown-up fan base.

Every detail has been faithfully recreated, right down to the very comfortable looking cockpit shown below. Make sure to check out Aaron’s Flickr album for loads more close-up shots.

Concrete jungle

Modern architecture doesn’t have to be all about boxes clad in plate glass. Inaugurated last October in the Italian city of Milan, the Bosco Verticale is a experiment in eco-architecture: Two high-rise apartment blocks which incorporate live trees into every level. And now Glascow-based builder Elspeth De Montes has created the definitive LEGO version! Here it is, next to a picture of the original:

Bushidō – Way of the Warrior

German builder Disco86 recently completed his triptych of builds focused on medieval Japan, for the 12th annual Colossal Castle Contest over at Classic-Castle.com. And I think it’s fair to say he saved the best for last, with this beautiful and colorful diorama. (Can you spot the lurking ninja?)

A golden age of racing

While not on the grand scale of Lino’s Hot Rod to Hell that we featured last month, this entry in the recent LUGNuts Steampunk Motorworks challenge by CaptainSmog still manages to hit all the right Victorian notes:

Flavor of the month

Monthly building challenges seem to be all the rage these days. And they result in a flood of awesome builds …sometimes too many for us to keep up with. Old faithfuls such as SHIPtember, MAkTober and Novvember are behind us now, as is the newer FOODcember. Meaning that now it’s time to focus our attention on… HARDuary!

All this month, builders from around the world will be recreating everyday objects out of LEGO. After pretty much shutting down the FOODcember challenge, Indonesian builder Kosmas Santosa is already knocking it out the park with some killer inanimate objects:

But things just got real, because freshly-minted LEGO designer Carl Merriam has entered the fray. Carl is well known for amazingly accurate LEGO builds of mechanical devices and scientific instruments, and is already showing great form with this old wooden office chair:

So pull up a seat (wooden or otherwise), and let’s see how this plays out!

“The second half of this show reminds me of Aspen ...cause it’s all downhill from here!”

Jim Henson’s beloved Muppets probably need no introduction, thanks to the international success both of the Sesame Street franchise, and a long series of excellent Muppet movies. But it’s a little harder to gauge how well-known The Muppet Show was. Airing over several seasons in the late seventies, the television show was produced and aired in the UK, as no US network would touch it.

After that, it’s less clear how widely syndicated the show became. But these excellent builds of show regulars Waldorf/Statler and the Swedish Chef by German builder Andreas Weissenburg (grubaluk) suggest to me that maybe the show did gain some international popularity after all!

Oh, and a word of warning: If you ever meet someone from Sweden, please please please do NOT ask them what they think of the Swedish Chef …it’s still kind of a sore point with them!