About Rod

Rod likes building stuff, particularly steampunk and microscale. He's built for a number of the Dorling Kindersley LEGO books, including LEGO Play and the Awesome Ideas book. When he's not building, he writes, and has published a trilogy of old-fashioned adventure stories. To pay the bills he works in innovation and marketing for one of the world's biggest brewers, inventing new beers and ciders. This is clearly the best job in the world.

Posts by Rod

A castle is a wish your heart makes

The subject of an impressive official LEGO set, Disney’s Cinderella’s Castle has also proved itself a popular building with LEGO microscale modellers. However, few of the versions we’ve seen previously have captured the detail of the original as effectively as this beautiful creation by Koen Zwanenburg. The high walls rising out of the water are nicely shaped, with some ingenious parts use (check out the hammers as supporting buttresses beneath the crenellations). The soaring towers are lovingly depicted, with a level of texture and detail which makes the model seem much bigger than it really is. And who would have thought the underside of plates would so perfectly depict the tall windows built into the Mansard roof?

This is an extensive redesign of a model Koen built a couple of years ago. It’s a great example of a builder revisiting their work and improving on it in almost every aspect. This is excellent microscale LEGO building.

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When desert warriors take over your classic castle

Here’s a fabulous tribute to a classic LEGO set — the iconic Yellow Castle 375, reimagined as a desert fortress. Galaktek has done a cracking job with this Arabian take on the 1978 original. Whilst the shape is immediately recognisable, a modern parts selection allows for the injection of more detail, with printed tiles and patterned fencing helping create the impression of elaborate tiling, and an appropriate choice of minifigures adding to the exotic Arabian atmosphere.

Best of all, the model features one of the most fondly-remembered elements of the original — it opens up. This was a much-loved play feature “back in the day” and, in this creation, allows us a better look at the fine interior work…

I’ll build about that tomorrow, after all tomorrow is another day

We see plenty of LEGO creations depicting scenes from movies. However, it’s less often we get a behind the scenes look at film production. That’s exactly what Marcel V. provides with this neat little diorama going backstage during the making of the 1939 classic Gone With The Wind. The scene shows Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler face-to-face inside a set which captures the feel of Tara, the plantation mansion in the movie. You can almost imagine the snide remarks and love-to-hate-you banter passing back and forth between the leads for the cameras’ benefit. The surrounding equipment is nicely put-together, with the lighting rig an obvious highlight. This is a fun little build and makes me want to see more “behind the scenes on the movies” LEGO creations.

Fun fact: for the famous sequence in the movie where Atlanta is set ablaze, the film-makers actually torched the abandoned sets from 1933’s King Kong.

The late 90s called, and Tony Hawk wants his video back

Skateboarding video games may have fallen out of favour since the heady years of Tony Hawk’s regular domination of the console charts. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have fond memories of practising ollies and flips for hours on end, with sore thumbs our only risk versus real-life skater injuries like broken wrists and shattered elbows. It seems Nick Jensen also has a soft spot for skateboarding videogames as he’s put together a LEGO version of one of Pro Skater‘s key collectible items — the hidden VHS tape which featured in every level. The tape is nicely done, built to scale with a real VHS cassette (although how many of us still have one of them lying around to check the measurements?!) The light-up frame is perfect, a smart re-creation of the highlights around the tape in-game. Sweet building dude.

Rocket man, burning up his fuse out here alone

LL166, this is Moonbase Control, you are clear to begin your approach…

Time to run through the LEGO Classic Space checklist: Transparent yellow canopy? Check. Blue body plating with light grey greebly-bits? Check. Yellow and black striping? Check.
And yet, this spaceship by ZCerberus manages to look fresh and new whilst still complying with all the Classic Space “rules and regs”. That’s at least partly down to those twin engines, with the cogs in the mountings implying the thrusters can rotate, making this a neat little VTOL craft. The fuselage angles are sharp too, with more than a little whiff of an Apache helicopter, making this look somehow dangerous despite the lack of obvious armament.

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

We’re big fans of the stylish architectural LEGO creations of Swedish builder Sarah Beyer. She has a knack of turning our favourite plastic building material into classy modern homes we’d love to live in. On top of the undoubted building skill on display, the presentation of the models is always immaculate. This image of her newest build is a case in point. It showcases the use of textured bricks and tiles to create a smooth-yet-detailed look, and the quality photography is reminiscent of imagery you’d find in a high-end homestyling magazine. Who wouldn’t want to spend a few hours lounging in those chairs, enjoying a cup of tea and taking in the garden view? Lovely.

Bavarian Motor Works gets the Danish Brick Works treatment

With the release of the excellent LEGO Creator Expert 10269 Harley-Davidson Fat Boy set, we appear to be experiencing a corresponding uptick in fantastic motorcycle creations. Here’s a belter of a bike from André Pinto — a brick-built version of a customised BMW R80 RT. The shaping and overall frame are spot-on, and the sticker-work is just perfect, adding little touches of detail without overwhelming the bricks. The splash of gold from the ribbed hoses adds a lovely burst of contrast against the black, as do the red forks, and the overall presentation of the model is enhanced by the wood-effect base.

What’s got two legs and goes woof?

Wildfire — Game Of Thrones‘ very own version of napalm. In this neat LEGO vignette by ekjohnson1 we get to see the everyday reality of Wildfire production and storage down in the depths of the Kings Landing branch of the Alchemists’ Guild. Sure, the gloopy green stuff is worth a fortune, and makes short work of any invader vessels coming up the Blackwater. But drop a candle in it? Things get hot and messy real quick. The green liquid is nicely done in this model, with transparent pieces capturing its unearthly glow, but the highlight for me is the subtle angle on the brick walls between the timber supports — a nice touch which perfectly evokes the idea of the arched tunnels beneath Westeros’ capital.

Enormous medieval town offers a gateway to the desert

LEGO Castle displays tend to focus on the Western European medieval era, with great grey fortifications set amid green forests, featuring knights engaged in combat, with perhaps the odd siege engine chucking rocks. How refreshing to see this huge collaborative display by thirteen members of SwissLug which breaks with tradition on two fronts: first, by depicting a city in the Levant (the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean), and second, by showing off the peaceful, multicultural side of life (probably right before the Crusaders show up and make a nuisance of themselves!)

Click here to enjoy the pictures of the diorama…

Ape, bear, whatever... it’s an epic figure

It’s not often we see a Sigourney Weaver inspired LEGO creation which isn’t something to do with the Alien movie franchise. Well here’s a cracking build from Ian Hoy inspired by the 1988 Dian Fossey biopic Gorillas in the Mist. Oh, hang on…My mistake. Seems this is actually inspired by PANDAS in the mist, more specifically Chen Stormstout — brewer, monk, and warrior — a character in the 2012 Mists Of Pandaria expansion to World Of Warcraft.

Regardless of its inspiration, this is excellent LEGO character modelling. The clothing is great — particularly the toggle fastenings, the white strip edging, and the way the pyjama-top hangs beneath the belt. The face has the brilliant combination of cute-yet-scary which the Panda warriors carried in the game, and all the details are present and correct, including the ponytail and the sandals on those clawed feet. Nice bearclaw emblems on the knees too.

Roadster Racers get the LEGO look

Ready for some Disney racing action? You’d better be, because here come Mickey and the Roadster Racers, depicted in LEGO bricks by Ian Ying. This super-cute trio of racing vehicles are nicely matched to their counterparts in the cartoon series — Mickey’s Hot Doggin’ Hot Rod is particularly good, with its twin-ear spoiler at the rear. The purist builders out there might have palpitations about it, but I think removing the arms from the minifigures was a smart choice. It allows the hot rods to have tighter proportions than if they’d have to accommodate the limbs, and it gives the characters’ heads an oversized chibi appearance which enhances the cartoon-style appeal. Seeing these, I demand Disney introduce an instant rebranding of the rather tired Magic Kingdom “classic,” Tomorrowland Speedway — I’d queue for hours to race one of these babies!

This LEGO build is an open book

Here’s a build worth taking note of — a 19th century workplace, in 1:1 scale by Russian LEGO builder Nikita Sukhodolov. We get an open ledger on a blotter, a pair of glasses, an inkwell and pen, and a candle to shed some light on it all. All the individual elements are well-built, but some standout features include the melting wax at the top of the candle and the simple-yet-perfect shaping of the spectacles. The ribbon-strip bookmark is nicely done too. I can imagine a whole series of 1:1 scale “workplaces” like this, taken from different technological eras as we progress from handwritten ledgers to desktop computers, tablets, and beyond.

About Rod

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