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 waffle-y good LEGO breakfast

Waffles and milk — a delicious breakfast. And the subject for a delicious digital LEGO creation by ExeSandbox. The waffles themselves are immediately recognisable — neat and tidy constructions of tiled bricks and slopes. But it was the scattering of fruit that caught my eye — balloon parts and clown afro wigs! Sadly there are some “impossible” colour/part combinations going on here. That’s normally enough for us not to cover a digital creation, but this one was so good we thought we’d still feature it. The dribbles of maple syrup are a case in point, they are beautifully done — genuinely gloopy and tasty-looking — but they feature some curved elements that don’t come in those colours in the real world. All-in-all, this is a breakfast of champions, but one that will remain a fantasy until LEGO actually makes those bricks.

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Monstrously good building

Hot on the heels of LEGO versions of the cartoon cast of Futurama, Palixa and the Bricks now takes on another band of animated characters: Mike, Sully, and Boo from Disney’s Monsters Inc. The studs-out construction style is perfect for the two monsters, somehow managing to effectively evoke both Sully’s fur, and Mike’s leathery hide. I think the modelling of Sully’s face is spot-on, and I particularly like the Tauntaun horns gracing his head. Little Boo is just perfect peeking out from beneath her hard hat — a nice companion to the larger pair, and perfectly scaled for the teddy bear clutched in Sully’s paw. All we need now is Roz: “Watching. Always watching.”

Go get ’em Golem

Orcs menacing your castle? Run out of rocks for your trebuchet? No problem. Simply call up your friendly neighbourhood wizard and he’ll turn your castle walls into a living weapon. Chris Perron‘s LEGO “Wall Golem” is a nicely-built model of a great idea. The golem looks suitably architectural, the shoulders and crown immediately evoking a castle brought to life. But it was the torso and its rock “ribcage” which caught my eye — a nice detail that manages to feel like some sort of organic masonry, in other words, exactly how a golem ought to look.

LEGO Koenigsegg is ggggreat

The Koenigsegg Agera is a beast of a supercar — 0 to 100 kph (0 to 62 mph) in 2.8 seconds and a theoretical top speed of 439 km/h (273 mph). It also looks like a boss. Gerald Cacas manages to do supercar styling at super-small scale with this lovely 7-studs-wide model. The curves and angles of the bonnet are particularly well done, and I love the blue of the interior and the way it contrasts with the black and white of the external livery.

Best of all, the doors and bonnet open, and the boot can pop off to reveal the detailed engine. Nice use of textured pieces like minifigure tools to provide more detail than you might expect in such a tightly-scaled model…

One seriously funky starfighter

Like real-world automobiles, it is to be assumed that spaceship design will go through eras where particular colours and shapes go in and out of fashion. Well, according to Cole Blaq‘s latest LEGO starfighter, brown will definitely be cool again in the future. The rich chocolate tones of this creation offer the perfect contrast to the trans-yellow canopy, and the stripes at the rear add a nice little splash of brightness. Couple the striking colour scheme with some sweet curves and effective greebly details at the front and you’ve got a wonderful design which manages to look both futuristic and retro at the same time.

Star trucking, across the universe

It’s always great to see a LEGO sci-fi model which looks vaguely “realistic” — ie. a projection of current tech or business activities into the near-future. With his latest creation Robert Heim tackles everyday interplanetary transport, and manages to do it in style. This Mack-branded space truck is a cracking model — all smooth white curves and engine grunt up-front, followed by a long train of cargo containers. The curve transitions around the cab are beautifully smooth — the sort of end-result that looks effortless but probably took hours of careful piece selection. Nice integration of the airplane cab and cement mixer parts — they look like they were designed to go together like this.

LEGO Landrover is technically brilliant

LEGO Technic is a fantastic system for creating functional models with working mechanisms. However, it’s less often that we see Technic parts (particularly panels) integrated brilliantly into a “regular bricks” creation. However, this fabulous model of a Landrover Defender by ianying616 goes to show that the best builders select the best pieces for the job, regardless of which branch of the LEGO parts family they may originally come from. The shaping here is excellent — a good combination of regular System bricks and Technic axles, joints, and panels — perfectly capturing the recognisable lines of the Defender.

This thing is a BEAST — bulky and beautiful, with a striking black and red colour scheme. Beyond the overall styling, the details deserve appreciation: a rooftop lamp rack, a detailed interior, working suspension and steering, and opening doors, boot, and bonnet. And lurking beneath that bonnet? A gleaming engine block, ready to propel this bad boy through any obstacle in its path. Great stuff.

Do you feel lucky cyberpunk? Well, do you?

William Gibson’s seminal sci-fi novel Neuromancer helped set the cyberpunk standard for urban cityscapes with its depiction of The Sprawl — a vast built-up area stretching the full length of the Eastern Seaboard of the US. Whilst Didier Burtin doesn’t mention Neuromancer with regards his latest model, this microscale LEGO creation immediately made me think of Gibson’s work. The architecture and the presence of some small-scale aerial vehicles also brings to mind Syd Mead’s vision of the cities of the future from Blade Runner. Whatever your particular favourite flavour of cyberpunk, you’re sure to find something you like in this model…

The city is gloriously detailed, rewarding a closer look with a wealth of textured detail, the product of smart parts choices and interesting combinations. Too often futuristic LEGO cities offer a homogenous architecture, but this offers a rich variety of building style, looking like it evolved over time in a messy clash of planning, business, and everyday living — much as a real world city does.

The model is all the more impressive for its tight footprint. All the glorious details in the images above are found within a small square of construction — a great advertisement for the effectiveness of microscale building in being able to conjure up epic vistas…

Bizarre crowd gathers in the bazaar

There are a wealth of details worth checking out in Andreas Lenander‘s latest LEGO creation — a busy marketplace in a Middle-East-inspired fantasy city — not least its unusual inhabitants. The city walls feature some nice little touches to break up the expanse of tan, and the detailing around the arch is spot-on. The towers provide a nice backdrop to the action, and the white one has some lovely texturing which delivers the impression of mosaics or elaborate carved screens. Below, the market itself is brimming with people and animals, creating a sense of activity and movement. You can’t look at this without finding yourself waiting on a big fight breaking out!

There are a huge variety of minifigures amidst the hustle and bustle of the marketplace. The mixing of figures from different LEGO themes can sometimes jar, but here it simply adds to the sense of a wider fantasy world and the bazaar as a melting pot of cultures and races…

Where the mountains meet the sea

A medieval town, nestling between the foot of the mountains and the shores of the sea — that’s the setting of John Tooker‘s latest LEGO creation. There’s a wealth of detail on display for a microscale model. The crenellations on the central keep are a nice touch, the rockwork is well done, and those tiny ships are lovely. I particularly like the autumnal shades amongst the foliage, and the tiny offsets on the green tiles creating the angled line between greenery and the beach. It’s the touches like that which elevate the best microscale modelling.

The most important room in the house

Here’s one of those LEGO creations which initially looks simple, but on closer inspection reveals a wealth of clever parts use amongst the details. This bathroom by alego alego is a lovely piece of work, all tied together with an attractive cohesive colour scheme. Don’t miss the upside-down R2D2 leg used for the sink, the minifigure hands and arm which make up the shower fittings, and that orange scarf used perfectly as a towel hanging from the rail. The masterstroke has to be the Imperial Scout Trooper helmet turned upside-down as a toilet bowl! Excellent part selection right there.

An enchanting destination for tiny pirates

Following up on his lovely micro version of the LEGO Pirates Skull Island set, Letranger Absurde (aka Vitroleum, aka Pacurar Andrei) is at it again. Here’s his take on 6278 Enchanted Island — and it’s a cracker. The landscaping is perfect, with tan curved and wedge plates peeking from beneath the green to suggest the curve of the beach. The textured rock parts are used well, the palm trees are excellent, and the red canoe is a nice touch. But the star of the show has to be that central rope bridge constructed from bucket handles. Lovely.

About Rod

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