At first glance nothing seems out of the ordinary about this modern Japanese tram going about its business on the streets of Sapporo, Japan…
…until you realize it was built from LEGO! Flickr member 1103spa not only went the trouble of photographing the model “on site” in forced perspective, but also did a great job using stickers to complete the illusion. Here’s the reveal:
With Brickworld fast approaching, this means one thing for many of our younger readers: No more school!
While most students say they’re studying, Ordo has been working hard studying how his exams can be brick built. He celebrated each exam with a delightful little build:
Congrats Ordo!
Finding LEGO builds of iconic spaceship Serenity is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel these days. And Evan B (Lego Junkie) admits the same is probably true of it’s diminutive companion, the UCS MF-813 Flying Mule land speeder. Which is why his idea of building it to Miniland scale and adding all the characters is pure genius!
And for Firefly fans who just really wanna see the vehicle, here you go, since I know we don’t cover space stuff on this blog very often…
Welcome back fight fans, to Sin City Nevada, USA for another round of Friday Night Fights! Tonight we’re going a bit cheesy – cheese wedges that is. Our contenders have been throwing around the cheese all month, posting a build a day using the humble Slope 30 1 x 1 x 2/3. Let’s go to the tale of the tape.
In the blue corner, we have Grant Davis who gives us a brilliant rendition of Chinese Checkers:
In the red corner, we have Eli Willsea who give us one of the coolest cheese wedge floor mosaics I’ve seen in awhile:
As usual, constant reader, you are tasked with deciding who’s the cheesier builder by way of comment. On the last edition of Friday Night Fights, Steampunk Rifles, Monster wins 9-1. Tune in next week for another action packed edition of Friday Night Fights!
Dane Erland (Mechanekton) has been ladling out delicious servings of mecha goodness in a distinctly stubby and bulky style. The most recent of these has a name best not repeated in either polite or impolite company, so I’ll let the picture do the talking.
And harking back to a simpler time (aka four months ago), Dane posted this duo of deadly tin cans brimming with character.
For no particular reason, here’s a second helping for today of some great character building from Russia. This time Dmitriy and Anna bring us this neat little model of every gamer’s favorite acerbic aristocratic adventurer, Lara Croft. And since the original game used third person perspective, it makes perfect sense that we get the reverse shot of Ms. Croft too, for old time’s sake.
There exists a small but vocal contingent of the adult fan community who look down upon Bionicle and its descendent Hero Factory, claiming that the pieces are juvenile, not useful, and altogether too different to mix with traditional bricks. I’ve never understood this train of thought. LEGO is about imagination, and the ability to successfully incorporate unusual elements into a model is generally viewed as positive. Besides, there are just so many cool things that can be done with Bionicle pieces, completely aside from building large poseable action figures.
Take, for instance, this wicked cool spaceship by Ricardo Soà. Incorporating both traditional bricks and pieces of Bionicle heritage, it’s menacing and awesome in a way that is fresh and new. It’s a welcome change of pace for a community which frequently sees the same styles again and again.
And since we’ve not featured Ricardo here before, it’s worth taking a peek at some of his other killer spacecraft.
Russian builder Fedin has taken a break from building collosal castles to try his hand at character building, with splendid results! Here’s his interpretation of Master Crane from the ever popular TV/movie franchise Kung Fu Panda…
As excited as we all are to see the very cool Ghostbusters CUUSOO set finally hit the shelves, wouldn’t it be even cooler if it came with a street to drive down, or some ghosts to fight? Korean building team OliveSeon realized this, and they went and did something about it…
Arca is a story told by three builders: Max Pointner, Ian Spacek, and Paul Vermeesch about a dying planet where the inhabitants cultivate a little basket of life – Arca – and created a glittering city only to see corruption seep in.
The overall construction of this build is extremely clever, an upside down Ziggurat with some fantastic transitions between a lush garden zone and dark cubes areas. I am having a hard time deciding if I like the little green house more, or the extremely complicated and interesting corrupted cube structure:
But what impresses me about this build, isn’t the interesting back story that they had developed or the quality and execution of the build itself, but the seamless manner in which three separate builders could create a single uniform build. I’ve had the pleasure of being in several collaborations over the years, but I have never been a part of something so tightly integrated. Though this isn’t the first time the three have collaborated on build – last SHIPtember they managed to some how build 1/3 of a SHIP each.
Thankfully Max has provided a bit of a behind the scenes on how they approached and executed the Arca Project for those looking at joining forces to do a collaboration build like this.
This weekend saw the grand opening of the Legends of Chima water park at LEGOLAND California. The layout and design of the park looks awesome. But instead of having to pore over a mere 2D map of the place, wouldn’t a brick-built 3D version be even more awesomer-rer? Well that’s what LEGOLAND master builder Joel Baker thought, so he designed one!
Joel was actually pool-side as he relayed some cool facts to us about the creation:
“This was built in one week by myself and four other master builders. It weighs 60 lbs and has roughly 55,000 pieces. It is currently part of a media tour and has made it’s way through several cities including New York, Boston, Texas, and Arizona. I hope it ends up in the park, as it would be our first brick built map – I believe the kiddos would enjoy figuring out where they are and where they want to go by pointing at LEGO instead of the usual (but still cool) paper!”
