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

The dudes abide

It’s hard to believe that it’ll be 5 years next month since Angus Maclane unleashed the CubeDude phenomenon upon the LEGO fan world, providing AFOLs with a simple template that would make ‘character building’ simple, fun and enormously popular.

In that time, the CubeDude Flickr group has amassed almost a thousand unique CubeDude creations, covering the gamut of characters from every corner of pop culture. And while the CubeDude fad has certainly diminished since those heady early days, it’s fun to see newer builders picking up where the rest of us left off. As demonstrated in this growing collection by Cristiano Spiller…

Milhouse and Krusty from The Simpsons

“Chromed up” Daft Punk

Gentleman’s favorites, Jessica Rabbit and Hello Kitty

Babar the Elephant, and his wife Celeste

But mostly notably, Cristiano just found out that he is soon to become a ‘CubeDad’, resulting in this rather unique addition! Congratulations, Cristiano!

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Vampire’s castle

When we featured Castor Troy‘s collection of Vampire Hunter steampunk vehicles back in June, the French builder was still hard at work on the centerpiece, the Vampire’s castle. Well now the diorama is complete! And what a whopper this impenetrable-looking Gothic masterpiece is…

A night without day ... a day without night

Castle and fantasy builders certainly like to build big. But most of the large castle dioramas that we showcase are limited to exteriors. So it’s exciting to see someone focus on a large interior instead!

This amazing cathedral interior by Pippo Zane was inspired by the final scenes of the 1985 movie Ladyhawke. And while the cathedral itself is deliberately jazzier than the one in the movie, the characters are all faithfully represented.

There are so many little details to explore in this build. But I particularly love the stuff going on in the balconies, and of course the stained glass windows.

Air supremacy

Proving that a LEGO model doesn’t have to be a spaceship in order to be totally swooshable, Dutch builder Red Spacecat has created the AV-24B Seahawk, an imaginary modern military VTOL gunship inspired by the AV-8B Harrier II jump-jet and AH-64 Apache helicopter.

As well as featuring the usual elegant lines and stud-free surfaces of his other builds, this one is also fully configurable and comes with all manner of interchangeable armaments, making for one fun toy!

And the attention to detail with stickering practically borders on the obsessive! It’s enough to make the model airplane builder in me salivate…

Amazingly life-like LEGO sculpture of the Monkey King (孫悟空)

Tyler Halliwell is best known to our regular readers as a creator of amazing LEGO busts. So his latest work – depicting the Monkey King of Chinese mythology – is an ambitious departure in terms of its size and construction. We think you’ll agree that the attention to detail and the naturalness of this figure’s clothing and facial expression are completely mind-blowing!

We journeyed for several months across the Asian subcontinent, rescuing helpless villagers from all manner of demons along the way, to visit the mountain in which Tyler has been imprisoned for the past 500 years, so we could find out more about this creation…

BB: So how many hours and how many bricks went into this creation?

TH: That’s tough to estimate, but probably about 100 hours over the past two months, with most of it coming into shape in the past two weeks. There’s less pieces than you’d think, as it’s mostly hollow but for a technic frame. So if I had to guess, I would say around 1500 bricks.

BB: What inspired you to choose the Monkey King as the subject of your latest LEGO sculpture?

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Great snakes!

As a tribute to the beloved Belgian comic book series Tintin, Canadian builder Paul Hetherington has perfectly recreated the cover of one of my favorite issues, Land of Black Gold.

The characters seem to literally fly out of the page at you! I particularly like that this cover has given Paul the opportunity to use some lovely ultra-rare turquoise colored bricks, for the Thompson Twins’ chemically enhanced beards.

Adorable superheros are adorable

This would certainly be an awesome team-up – although it would never happen as we have a mix of Marvel and DC superheros here. But that certainly didn’t stop TKH from applying his normally anime-focused “chibi” building style and applying it to some Western characters. Super-cute!

“Ain’t no thing like me, except me!”

Hard to believe it’s only been a year since Chris McVeigh began his charming series of Brick Sketches, which depict various characters from comic books, cartoons and movies with ‘brush strokes’ carved from LEGO. And I think his latest one – Rocket Raccoon from the wildly popular Guardians of the Galaxy – might just be my favorite so far.

And if you like that, you’re sure to enjoy the 25+ other sketches that Chris has accumulated over the past 12 months. No doubt, everyone will have their own particular favorite! No pugs yet, though ;-)

Licensed to thrill

Continuing his obsession for stud-free minifig-scale builds of iconic movie vehicles, ER0L brings us the classic Aston Martin DB5, made famous by its appearance in the earlier James Bond movies.

Much as I love this rendition, I’m still hoping that <cough> that he is going to produce a modified version featuring revolving license plates, tire slashers, bullet-proof rear screen, front mounted machine guns and – of course – an ejector seat!

“High on a hill was a lonely goatherd...”

It’s funny how your perspective changes with age. As a kid I was tortured annually with the BBC’s Christmas airing of the Rogers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music. But as an adult I find it absolutely captivating – all three hours of it. I mean, it’s got everything… Nuns. Yodeling. Christopher Plummer. Some Nazis.

In the film adaptation, the The Lonely Goatherd number was performed as a marionette show (by Bil Baird and Cora Eisenberg-Baird). And now half a century later, VirtualLUG die-hard Millie McKenzie has perfectly recreated the entire theater and its distinctive puppets for our enjoyment:

If all this looks vaguely familiar, but you need your memory jogging, here’s the original scene:

Clearly the goats were too lifelike, as sadly Millie’s cat later went on to destroy the entire setup…

…naughty kittie, over the Alps into Switzerland with you!

Rosetta comet encounter recreated in LEGO

After over 10 years in flight, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta space probe today arrived at it’s target, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. And builder Stefan Schindler decided to commemorate the event by recreating it in LEGO! Not only did he do a splendid job on the probe, he even managed to capture the bizarre shape of the comet as well.

Stefan has entered his creation in the ESA’s official #RosettaAreWeThereYet photo contest. So LEGO fans should head over there and VOTE FOR IT NOW! (Entries are piling up so you may have to search for it on the second or third page).

“We are singing stardust”

Popular culture is filled with many iconic fictional spacecraft, but relatively few factual ones. But to anyone old enough to remember Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos, or young enough to have enjoyed its more recent incarnation, the image below will stir up many fond memories!

It is of course a NASA Voyager probe, faithfully recreated in LEGO by Ryan H (eldeem)…

Launched in the 1970’s, NASA’s Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft were actually the first to explore the outer solar system, and the first to carry a message for any aliens that might encounter them. But the later Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes gained much more notoriety, with their more ambitious missions and superior imaging capabilities. Even the “message from Earth” got an upgrade, from a simple plaque, to a recording containing images and sounds from Earth (which you can even see in Ryan’s model above).

Lasting more than a decade, the Voyager missions were much longer than anything the public were used to at that time. Every few years one of the spacecraft would reach its next target, and the world would be caught up in Voyager fever all over again, as amazing images of far-off worlds flooded our screens. Still transmitting to this day, the Voyager probes are among the most distant man-made objects in existence, and are now at the very edge of the solar system, headed for interstellar space.

Ryan’s Voyager is a commission for the University of Colorado, and will be on display at the CU Heritage Center from mid-September. Go check it out!