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

Great Plains grazing

What’s the difference between a buffalo and a bison? You can’t wash your hands in a buffalo. Okay, terrible jokes aside, here’s an excellent pair of LEGO bison put-together by Jens Ohrndorf. The shaping is excellent, as is the restrained colour scheme, and the mix of smooth and studded pieces used creates an effective simulation of the bison’s patchy shaggy coat.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen bison models by Jens. Check out this cute pair of tiny LEGO bison and a mammoth we featured a couple of years ago.

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A brick-built home is always in fashion

When it comes to LEGO houses, Sarah Beyer builds some of the best. We’ve taken a look at her jungle holiday home previously, and whilst this house might be less exotic in its setting, it’s no less accomplished in its construction and fit-out. The tan walls with their black detailing offer a sharp contrast to the feature wall, letting its striping really stand out. The landscaping and planting around the house create a sense of a cared-for property situated in a pleasant urban neighbourhood.

As ever, Sarah has included a detailed interior, including this stylish upstairs bedroom with its floor-to-ceiling windows. However, all that natural light comes at a cost — I notice there are no curtains, so the privacy may be somewhat lacking.

Click here to see more photos of this lovely model

Fifty shades of green

This microscale LEGO landscape by Emil Lidé offers a picturesque insight into the expansion of the LEGO colour palette — particularly in green. The model’s colour scheme effortlessly recreates a realistic forest feel, and the variety of colours is supported by the variety of construction techniques used amongst the trees. Beyond the forestry, there are some lovely touches — don’t miss the tan Technic pins used to create the wheat field, and the fence built from brown minifigure hands. The only thing I’m unconvinced by is the elaborate border on the diorama’s base — I think it distracts from the central build and would have been better as a plain construction. However, that’s a minor quibble with an otherwise excellent creation.

An ace Sky-Fi fighter

When it comes to the “Sky-Fi” Dieselpulp style of LEGO building, one man is the undisputed master of the air: Jon Hall. He strikes again with his latest retro-flavoured aircraft — the P-98 Nemesis. The shaping of the hefty triple-fuselage structure is excellent, and there are loads of lovely touches on display — the strong colour-blocking, the raked exhausts peeking from beneath the engine cowls, and the racks of ordnance slung under the wings.

Packed full of Jon’s trademark attention to detail, the model includes custom stickers, a folding undercarriage, and a detailed cockpit interior. Check out this view of the seat and the instrumentation panel with its trio of joysticks. And don’t miss the spanner mounted up-front as a gun sight — great stuff.

Great little space to hang around

Here’s a tiny slice of futuristic LEGO from Blake Foster — a cool spaceship in an equally-smart hangar. The ship itself is a masterpiece of microscale building, boasting an impressive depth of texture for such a small creation. Blake has made the most of the details moulded into the chainsaw handle element which makes up the core of the craft, but it’s the chunky droid arms used to create the thruster fins which give the ship its distinctive shape and character. Set the craft in a neat little hangar (featuring binocular parts used to create pillars) and couple with some excellent macro photography, and you’ve got a great piece of LEGO microscale.

Stunning LEGO castle towers over the forest

Respect the Crown! And respect the LEGO building on display in this fabulous Castle diorama by LegoLord. There’s a cute little town nestled in amongst the forest, an impressive church and gatehouse, and towering over it all, an impressive fortress of a castle.

The castle walls are superbly detailed, with a great mix of textured parts, muted colours, and building techniques. Large-scale LEGO Castle creations can fall into the “big grey wall” trap, but not here — it’s excellent work all round, the eye rewarded with beautiful touches wherever it falls…

Click here to see more images of this stunning creation

Cell blocks

It’s like a LEGO version of an HBO melodrama: when your environs change from stylish loft apartment to gritty prison cell in the blink of an eye. The master of LEGO interiors, Heikki Mattila, does it again with this latest creation — a stark departure from the signature modernist style of previous models. A classic “institutional” colour scheme complements some well put-together furniture, including an uncomfortable looking toilet. The whole thing is rounded off with that brick-built cell door. Great lighting on the photography too — those shadows create an appropriate sense of gloom.

Aces high – a duel in the sky

Harking back to an age of more gentlemanly aerial combat, these LEGO versions of a Sopwith Camel and a Fokker Triplane from Vaionaut are beautifully done. The tan and dark brown colour scheme on the Sopwith is perfect, and I particularly like the smart use of clip-and-bar pieces to give the upper wings their signature raked-forward look. Nice use of binoculars and screwdrivers to create the twin machine-guns too. The restrained use of some custom stickers, an appropriate choice of minifigures, and a lovely little workbench all come together to complete the scene.

However, if you have a Sopwith, you must have an opponent in red. And sure enough, Vaionaut has built a gorgeous Fokker Dr.I to accompany.

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Red-hot red Hot Rod

What’s red and chrome and hot all over? This fantastic supercharged LEGO hot rod from ianying616. The big fat tyres at the rear, the chrome hubs, the raked windscreen — all good. But what catches the eye and demands all your attention is the sheer grunt packed into that gleaming engine. The front-end of this beast is a wonderful confection of chromed and flat-silver parts. You can almost hear it’s throaty growl as it roars down the road.

And the interior isn’t too shabby either, comfy striped-leather seats, and a fully-equipped dashboard. Foot pedals too! Brilliant attention to detail…

Tiny LEGO version of Manila Cathedral

Here’s a LEGO model worthy of a little worship. Gerald Cacas has put together this wonderful microscale rendition of Manila’s Cathedral. There’s an impressive level of detail on display here, with smart texturing around the base, at the top of the walls, and on the dome. My head hurts just looking at the brickwork that’s gone into the belltower.

Modelling an existing building with any sort of accuracy at this scale is an achievement in itself, but to include a detailed interior? That’s just showing off! Gerald does exactly that with a lift-off roof revealing the inside — complete with pews and altar. This is excellent microscale work.

Dive into a tropical paradise

We’ve featured Sarah Beyer‘s tropical holiday home LEGO models in the past, but this latest creation takes her architectural style and moves it out of the jungle and onto the beach. This Tahiti-inspired holiday hut is a delight — a showcase of effective texturing, nice landscaping, and cool water effects.

It’s worth diving-in to take a closer look at some of the details, like the path towards the veranda with its mix of stones and plants…

See more views of this tropical LEGO paradise

Future LA has never looked cuter

“Cute” isn’t a word you’d normally associate with the dystopian cyberpunk future envisioned in Blade Runner. However, that’s what comes to mind with automaton120‘s futuristic microscale LEGO street scene. The backdrop nicely evokes the neon-soaked architecture of cyberpunk-LA, but the stars of the show here are the vehicles. That police spinner is a cracking little model, and the others really capture the feel of the cars and trucks in the movie. The presentation of the model could have been better, maybe clipping the ugly sheet backdrop out of the image, and some image processing could have added lens flare to the signage and vehicle lights etc. But not every builder likes to add post-production effects, so that’s nit-picking at an otherwise cool LEGO creation.

Regular readers will know we like us a LEGO Police Spinner here on TBB. Syd Mead’s classic design is a rite-of-passage build for any self-respecting sci-fi builder. We’ve featured a few brilliant examples in our time — including this stunning rain-soaked Blade Runner scene from Tyler — but we don’t see a lot of microscale versions, so this creation was too cute to pass up.

About Rod

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