Category Archives: Models

This is what we’re all about. We scour the web for the best custom LEGO models to share with you. From castles and spaceships to planes, trains, and automobiles, you’ll find the best LEGO creations from builders all over the world right here on The Brothers Brick.

How did the jaguar get its spots? For this incredible LEGO model, from tires and more

Automaker Jaguar’s mottos are “delete ordinary” and “copy nothing,” and those mottos could just as well apply to builder Sakiya Watanabe, who, over just one year of building characters and creatures, has constantly pushed boundaries with LEGO parts use. Take a close look at the builder’s latest model and you’ll find surprises throughout. The face is dense with clever solutions, like a turkey nose, fabric tongue, and minifig arms. The rock base hides a Scout Trooper helmet, Power Miners monster mold, and what I think is a DUPLO baby hippo.

But the most exciting technique is the Jaguar’s spots, created by inverting tires and using minifig hair or brick configurations inside to create organic shapes. Perhaps there’s a bit of homage with Sakiya’s jaguar to DeRa’s incredible tiger, current on display in the Masterpiece Gallery in Billund.

Click to learn more about how the model was created

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This medieval ballista will make your head roll

When battle calls for a massive medieval missile, your army should definitely have a ballista on hand. And Metro[pcs] has crafted one for all your LEGO castle siege needs. We love the use of gears and paint rollers to craft a machine that looks functional at such a small scale. But mostly we’re head over heals for those helmets as wheels.

We’re ecstatic about this Phantom-X mech

Although it sprang from Marco De Bon’s imagination, this masterfully built mech looks like it taken straight from a yesteryear toy aisle. The mostly black body is perfectly highlighted with bits of red and silver, and the range of posing possibilities outshines a lot of comparable LEGO builds. But Marco has had plenty of practice perfecting these bots. Check out our interview with Marco about his 1o years of building LEGO mecha!

A bloom you wouldn’t want to see in your garden

There are few builders doing creepy monsters as consistently well as [VB], who is back with a beast that’s equal parts insect, virus, and flower. The bright red at the center of (what I’m going to assume is) the head draws the eye immediately. But it’s the appendages that I can’t stop staring at. The delightfully creep blend of flexible tubes and exposed Technic somehow still manages to feel like an organic creature. And I love the subtle pop of color that the old gray harpoon guns give against the new bluish gray.

You’ll want to enable cookies for this adorable LEGO creation

Stewart Lamb Cromar is one of the nicest AFOLs you could ever hope to meet, and I was lucky to get to see the builder and his latest MOC at Skærbæk Fan Weekend last month. The creation, Milk and Cookies, of course features Stewart’s favorite theme – Fabuland – but rather than taking place at animal scale, the mice are feasting on 1:1 scale props. The brick-built chocolate milk carton is a the building highlight, but it’s the inclusion of human-sized LEGO mugs and inspired use off a paper bag as a ~~cookie~~ biscuit wrapper that make the build truly special.

The cheeky mice feature in this beautiful postcard illustration that Stewart commissioned from artist Kornél Pittmann that I was lucky to receive at the event.

As cheerful a person as Stewart is, I’ll never forget how dark his humor can go, as evidenced by his entry in our Dungeon Crossing contest earlier this year.

A symphony of Silksong tributes in LEGO

Hollow Knight: Silksong is the rare game that delivers on the hype, blending beautiful worldbuilding with brutal difficulty. Protagonist Hornet and the bug-like denizens of Pharloom have inspired an outpouring of fan models from the LEGO community. Here are some of our favorites!

Fresh off his incredible series of Hollow Knight builds, Joss Ivanwood begins climbing Pharloom with a series of encounters. First, Hornet encounters Shakra, the mapmaker. She’s a lot tougher than Cornifer!

My favorite of Joss’ new builds is Sherma, just a little guy on a big pilgrimage! The party hat in golld makes a perfect miniature chime.

Our tour of Pharloom’s bugs continues after the break

A tale of two LEGO trees

There are few subjects I enjoy seeing in LEGO as much as trees, from the single-mold pine trees in vintage sets to the enormous redwoods of Sequoia Tree Trail. I never cease to be amazed by the creative ways that AFOLs find to make decidedly organic branches and bark out of plastic bricks. At Skærbæk fan weekend, a pair of builds from Finnish builder Niina L show just how evocative a LEGO tree can be. First up is this incredible iron tree with a greeble trunk sitting atop a pile of tires and surrounded by blood-red water. It’s a glimpse of a dystopian world where green has been all but forgotten. A lone sprouting branch offers hope in this dead world.

A second build also showcases Niina’s incredible talent for creating organic forms from irregular parts. This time the trunk incorporates incorporates a mix of Bionicle, constraction, and System parts in brown. The berry-like foliage, made from red helmets, adds a dose of whimsy to this scene where the tree’s resident is greeted by a friend or suitor.

Two amazing trees, each evoking a story of hope and connection.

Epic interstellar collab builds on LEGO’s City-Space aesthetic with Mission to Thalora Prime

LEGO might not have released a stand-alone Space theme since 2013’s Galaxy Squad, but the spirit of space exploration lives on as a sub-theme of City. Two years of great sets have introduced new uniforms, personal mechs, and swooshable ships with an aesthetic closer to Interstellar than retro sci-fi. At last month’s IDS Brickworld, long-time collaborators and Rogue Bricks membrers Michael Diermann and Sascha Brüning debuted a sprawling tribute to the City Space called “Mission on Thalora Prime.”

The builders adhere to the aesthetics of the line, from the nougat earth to the modular building style to the alien shrubbery, while expanding in scope and variety. The arid alien landscape is wonderfully done and provides a fun foundation for an aerial walkway to the radar module. LEGO 60430 Interstellar Spaceship has never looked better than here, with hangars to hold a squadron.

Michael, aka Boba-1980, shares a video from the event on his feed.

Soft serve toad with a cherry on top

We never get tired of seeing new additions to the Frogust lineup, even in October, and this spin from LEGO’s newest set designer, Nathan Don, is especially sweet. Dubbed ‘Cherritoad’, this frog gives the theme its just desserts with a whimsical design that wouldn’t be out of place in the Pokémon universe. For a LEGO model, the shaping and techniques are incredible. My favorite details are the wide cartoony eyes and the way the ‘cone’ scales upward (we’d love to see what the inside of this build looks like!). You can’t help but love this little guy!

You can read more about this build on Nathan’s Woomy World blog.

A Minecraft Movie’s Game Over World lovingly recreated in LEGO

A Minecraft-inspired modular? Thanks to A Minecraft Movie’s isekai plot taking real-world gamers into the fantasy land of voxel-based construction, it’s not as weird as you might think! Swedish AFOL Jenny Bergensten, a member of Swebrick, is a fan of the film – specifically Game Over World, the retro gaming shop run by Jason Momoa’s Garret “The Garbage Man” – and she spent much of the summer faithfully recreating the set in LEGO.

Jenny recreates the shop inside and out, capturing the faded glory of both Garret, the former arcade star, and a small town main street.

Insert quarter to continue exploring Jenny’s build

Liminal LEGO horror is in bloom

Japanese builder Pan Noda is a master at crafting liminal spaces in LEGO. From ancient ruins to cursed malls to surreal swimming pools, their worlds make the familiar look strange or even haunted. Controlled depth of field and a lack of minifigs make scale confounding and dreamlike. Pan Noda’s latest takes one of the most cheerful LEGO elements, the magenta flower with shaft found in so many kid sets and pick-a-brick-bins, and creates one of their most cursed scenes to date. Titled “A Field of Mocking Flowers,” a column rises from an endless field, a smiling face seen in negative space. Is there a structure beneath the blooms that happens to have a face, or is this the visage of some floral hive-mind? Are the boardwalks there to protect the flowers from pedestrian feet, or are they to protect us from this malevolent magenta force?

Wind turbine transport: a trilogy in a few thousand parts

When I built my Lego mega windmill trailer, for carrying a wind turbine nacelle, I did not think this would be the start of a trilogy. However, I subsequently built a truck that carries a rotor hub. At that point, it was pretty much inevitable that I would also build a vehicle carrying one of the blades.

I put this off for more than two years, though, because I did not relish building the blade. The nacelle represents a Vestas V90 wind turbine. By now, this is something of an old clunker, and it is quite small compared to more modern turbines. Nonetheless, its blades are still 44 m long. This makes them 128 studs long at the scale of my other vehicles (1/43). And I happen to like building small details. This is one reason why I enjoy building minifigure-scale trucks so much. By comparison, the blade’s size and its complicated shape would make building it pretty tedious. And it was tedious, indeed. However, the finale to my wind turbine trilogy is one of the most beautiful shapes I have ever built.