The second kinda-annual Small Starfighter Contest is in full swing, and a week in we’re already seeing some strong contestants. My favorite entry thus far is the R7 Senex by Nate Rehm-Daly. Compact, with just the right mix of greebs and armor, all wrapped in a fantastic color scheme.
Category Archives: Models
LEGO Ideas 21109 Exo Suit box art revealed [News]
Last Friday the video announcement for the Exo-suit was posted, and now you can see the photo of the box art for the set and a comparison shot with Peter Reid’s original model. The set retails for $34.99 and is available August 1st. There is a highly limited supply, which means LEGO will not make more once the initial production sells out.
I’m the hot shot
This spider tank by Christopher Basset looks ready to roll into combat. The tank’s pose and the camera angle really makes the model come alive.
Red Boots Was Made For Walking
Once again, I have spotted something, and then waited a week to post it. Once again, I still think it’s worth the post, and worth waiting for. I give you Red Boots, a mecha by Torokimasa. The builder had blended smooth curves and chunky greebles to great effect. He’s also made nice use of Bionicle/Hero Factory bits, especially at the knees. I bet this would be really fun to pose in an inner-city battle.
¡No pasaran! Commemorating the Spanish Civil War in LEGO
Despite my stated fascination with Stalingrad, it does occasionally feel unfortunate that I find myself building what amounts to Stalin’s war machine. I took a break over the weekend to build some military models with slightly less moral ambiguity, inspired by the Republican forces who fought a losing battle against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1936, Fascist elements within the Spanish military launched a coup d’etat against the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic. Supported by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, Generalissimo Franco’s “Nationalist” forces quickly gained the upper hand, and Spain soon became a field experiment for the weapons and tactics that would be used shortly afterward in World War II. For example, the German and Italian air forces destroyed the town of Guernica, an atrocity memorialized in the famous painting by Pablo Picasso. Everyday people from across the world flocked to join the Republican cause, including thousands of American and British volunteers, who formed part of the “International Brigades.” George Orwell fought alongside Republican forces (which inspired Homage to Catalonia),
The base of support for the Second Spanish Republic’s secular, egalitarian platform rested among socialists and trade union members, including many communists (back before communism as an ideology was the exclusive province of authoritarian regimes). As a result, only Stalin’s USSR rushed to the aid of the Republicans, sending arms and armor such as the Soviet BT-5 tank and BA-6 armored car that I’ve built here from LEGO.
My BT-5 is based on my own BT-7, as I mentioned yesterday, but the BA-6 proved a bit of a challenge. The angular hood and rear hull both required some half-stud offset and SNOT (Studs Not on Top) construction, including the two middle axles, built onto the chassis with jumper plates. The turret turns, the gun elevates, and both side doors open.
Its plight ignored by all but Mexico and the Soviet Union, the Second Spanish Republic fell to Franco and his Fascist forces in 1939, on the eve of World War II. Franco remained ostensibly neutral during the war, and then became a key NATO ally during the Cold War. He ruled as an authoritarian dictator until his death in 1975. An estimated half a million people died during the Spanish Civil War, and mass executions continued long after the end of the civil war.
As I wrote in my post yesterday about Stalingrad, using LEGO to recreate historical people, places, and even equipment connects me to history in a tangible and meaningful way. My hope is that I’ve piqued your interest as well.
Ogre Encampment
ZUG ZUG!
Inspired from the Warcraft video games, Ilia (Combee) has created this wonderful little ogre camp:
He’s done a fantastic job of capturing the visual style in the game, not an easy feat given the round nature of the tower and hut.
A tavern fit for a traveling king
César Soares (csar_soares) says that this medieval tavern is his first Castle-themed model, and only his fifth LEGO model that he designed himself. That’s frankly a bit hard to believe given the detail and the polish, so I’m going to make myself feel better by assuming that César means that it’s the fifth he’s posted publicly. Because look at that roof and those walls!
(Via LegOficina dos Baixinhos.)
And since we haven’t featured César on The Brothers Brick before, here’s some lovely microscale landscaping, with a train heading into a tunnel under a mountain, atop which perches a very precarious castle:
There is no land beyond the Volga!
The Battle of Stalingrad continue to fascinate me. Stalingrad became a symbolic battle of the wills between two totalitarian dictators that manifested itself in devastating real-world consequences for over a million men and women who died on the front lines. For me, building LEGO models inspired by such a brutal battle isn’t about cool things that go “Boom!” Using LEGO to build vehicles, minifigs, and dioramas of historical events puts me in touch with aspects of history that I wouldn’t normally explore — I’m reading Antony Beevor’s excellent Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943
Back on the 71st anniversary of the end of the battle in February, I posted a small diorama titled Victory in Stalingrad, but didn’t post any of the actual vehicles or minifigs, since I was building toward a much larger diorama for BrickCon this October. I finally managed to take some pictures yesterday.
Not much has changed since February on my KV-1s Heavy Tank (“KV-1s” is the model of the tank, a faster and lighter variant with a lower turret), but I’ve removed the extra plate between the turret and the hull and added some ammunition crates on the rear deck.
The KV-2 Heavy Artillery Tank was based on the KV-1 chassis, so a LEGO KV-2 to follow my KV-1 was inevitable. The monstrous turret enabled me to build quite a bit more functionality into the KV-2, including a fully elevating gun, as well as hatches on the top and rear that both open.
“The tales and songs fall utterly short of your enormity, oh Smaug the stupendous!”
Regular readers will know that we’ve featured many LEGO dragons over the years, but I think on this occasion YOUR ARGUMENT IS INVALID now that heavy-duty character builder Shawn Snyder has decided to get in on the game with this recreation of Tolkien’s Smaug. From head to tail it’s 28 inches and the wingspan is a whopping 35 inches!
We used Sauron’s seeing-stone to track down the damp cave that Shawn hides in, and dispatched our goblin hoard to interrogate him about his latest bunker-busting creation…
TBB: You’re best known for creating large figures and busts of humanoid characters from videogames such as Halo and Assassins Creed, or movies like Iron Man and Predator. What inspired you to attempt a monster this time?
SS: I’ve actually wanted to make a dragon for quite some time. It wasn’t until ArchLUG did a collaborative build of Laketown that made me commit to finally attempt it. After all, Laketown needs a Smaug!
TBB: Tell us about the build. How did you get such a large yet detailed model to stay in one piece? Did it present any new building challenges for you?
Definitely no ugly duckling
Not many people have mastered the LEGOLAND building style, outside of the master builders of LEGOLAND themselves. But for several years now, teen builder Joshua Christenson has been employing this technique to create convincing sculptures far smaller than those you’d typically see in the theme parks, as illustrated by this beautiful swan…
Forestry Crane Truck
Toronto got hit pretty bad last year with an ice storm and destroyed a lot of Toronto’s tree cover, which took weeks to clean up all the poor trees. The only cool part was I got to see a lot of the Toronto Forestry trucks rolling around, which Isaac Mazer (Ricecracker.) was able to recreate with stunning accuracy:
This Freightliner 108SD truck is operated by the City of Toronto’s Department of Forestry, and Isaac has been able to recreate the truck’s distinctive hood – in minifig scale – by shaping an official LEGO eraser!
This truck also has a functional truck bed to dump out trees and a knuckle-boom crane to pick up trees:
The Grand Budapest Hotel made with over 50,000 Lego bricks
Ryan Ziegelbauer led a team of Lego designers to create this massive replica of The Grand Budapest Hotel from the Wes Anderson film. Together they spent around 575 hours and used more than 50,000 Lego blocks to make this 7-foot-tall model. Check out the video below for a glimpse of the building process.
