Once again Jon Hall proves that he is truly the master of building beautiful airplanes. He has only posted one photo so far, but I am looking forward to more shots of that gorgeous light-aqua coloured underside.
Category Archives: Models
Steam 2013 round-up
While most of my fellow Brothers were having a great time at Brickcon in Seattle, I was enjoying myself immensely at the UK’s largest LEGO-event: the Great Western Lego Show in Swindon. The show is organised by Martin Long, who is the president of the Brickish Association. The show took place on Saturday the 5th and Sunday the 6th of October at a great location: the Great Western Railway museum, a.k.a. the Steam Museum. Most of the models on show were built by members of the association, who tend to refer to the show simply as ‘Steam’.
The models were all of a very high quality, but I want to share a few highlights with you. The first is the Rolls Royce Trent 1000 jet engine build by Bright Bricks, which is a company run by Duncan Titmarsh -the UK’s only Lego Certified Professional- and Ed Diment (Lego Monster). The model is built to half scale, weighs 350 kg and was commissioned by Rolls Royce for last year’s Farnborough Air Show. It is beautifully built and by means of an electric motor the fans actually spin, which gives it certain hypnotic quality.
Another very large and impressive model was the Tigelfáh Castle layout (We featured part of this a few weeks ago). It was a collaborative build by no fewer than eight builders: James Pegrum (peggyjdb), Harry Russell (Kǻrrde), Thomas Coleman (Malravion), Luke Watkins Hutchinson (– Derfel Cadarn –), Barney Main (SlyOwl), Colin Parry (Cuahchic), Jimmy Clynche (Invicta Bricks) and Steven Snasdell (workshysteve). It was enormous, fantastically detailed and very hard to capture in a single photo! No matter from what angle you looked at this, you always spotted a nice new detail.
One of the favourites of the public at the Steam show is the mosaic build. Members of the audience can fill a baseplate with 2×2 plates (in pre-arranged patterns printed out on paper), after which the plate is added to the mosaic. The mosaic gradually grows during the show and the end result is always spectacular.
For more pictures of these and other models at the show, check out the photosets by Andrew Harvey, Alec Hole and Drew Maughan. This was my 7th time at the event and it just keeps getting better. I know I am not the only builder already planning what to build for the show next year.
And I would eat them with a Krote...and in a Banana Boat.
This Eggeater by Logan (∞CaptainInfinity∞) is pretty spot on considering how wacky of a shape this starfighter has. He has used a lot of neat techniques throughout the build, in particular I really like how he achieved the detailing along the top of the gun. And then of course there is the brilliant photo composition, the combination of brick built foreground and digitally edited background is incredibly pleasing to the eye.
So I will eat them in a box
And I will eat them with a Falkes
And I will eat them in a house.
And I will eat them with a Fledermaus.
And I will eat them here and there.
Say! I will eat them ANHYWHERE!
I do so like
green Eggeaters and ham!
Thank you!
Thank you,
Sam-I-am!
The Biggest Anti-Gravity Sphere
Bart de Dobbelaer, the master of crazy space dioramas, strikes again with this monolithic structure of gravity defying space garbage–or whatever that is. In any case, Bart’s signature style of limited colors and great designs makes for an exceptional diorama. The all dark-brown base gives a more subdued feel to the setting than LEGO’s standard reddish brown, and I’m not sure I even want to know how Bart got all of those spikey bits to stick to the suspended sphere.
Gothic SHIP Ahoy
Giving a whole new meaning to “flying buttresses,” Awesome O’Saurus provides us with this stunning rendering of a Gothic-architecture inspired space battleship. After seeing dozens of space tankers and flying boxes with striping (which are cool, to be sure), this spaceship is a welcome new style. Already I want to go design my own space-worthy cathedral of doom.
One of Pluto – An experiment in uncontrolled building.
As LEGO builders we each find our own style in which we create. For myself I have always concentrated on the aspects of playability, so as a result tend to sacrifice aesthetics for function in many cases. LEGO has and always will be a toy for me. I wish I could categorize myself as a LEGO artist like many builders out there, but who am I kidding, I build this stuff to play with. Another side effect of this mindset is the tendency to disregard certain pieces of inspiration if I think the resulting model would be too fragile to play with. I can now use my sons as an excuse to perpetuate this habit, but honestly they do not impact my thought process because I want to swoosh and zoom my models just as much as they do.
Which leads me to One of Pluto, a piece of Maschinen Krieger concept art that I first saw years ago while perusing the internet for all things Ma.K (shortly after first being introduced to the genre by Tim’s early Ma.K stuff). The design completely intrigued me. It was so vastly different than anything else in the universe but somehow still fit in perfectly. Like all cool pieces of concept art I immediately contemplated the possibility of building it with LEGO. However, quickly dismissed the idea due to the clearly un-LEGO friendly shape.
Well that was 6 or 7 years ago, and over that time I got up the nerve to take a crack at it. It was in fact during last Ma.Ktoberfest that I intended on building this, but real life got in the way and I never ended up starting anything. I still had my bag of dark grey boulders, which I ordered specifically for the project, set aside. So about a week ago I start fiddling with the parts. But I soon discovered that I had my mind too set within a controlled and symmetrical style of building. If I was going to be successful I had to completely change the way I normally build. Those that know me, know that my collection is in dire need of sorting, but for this project I think that fact actually helped. Because instead of going through a bin of parts looking for a specific piece, I simply rummaged through the bin and collected an assortment of pieces that I thought could work. So my starting point was a large pile of random dark grey bits and bobs (& my boulders). I knew that if I could get the general configuration of the bulbous abdomen figured out the rest would fall in place relatively easily. I experimented with several internal structures to get the right general shape with boulders, but again found myself concentrating too much on playability…I needed to admit to myself that this was going to be a display model only. Once I decided that, I quickly found a set up for the abdomen that gave me the right shape. But what totally surprised me was that once I used the assorted strings, hoses and rubber bands to add the detailing, they in fact held the boulders in place so well that it became super robust and easily swooshable. The upper ‘torso’ and head took a few tries as well, but were certainly simpler than the abdomen. I am super happy with the end result both in terms of aesthetics and playability. This will definitely be sitting on the ol’ LEGO shelf for quite some time.
In the end this build has made me realize that stepping back and looking at a project from a different perspective can be hugely beneficial. I took a fresh approach and actually ended up with familiar results.
Happy Ma.Ktoberfest everyone.
Beautiful LEGO Book [Review]
A new fan-written Lego book called Beautiful LEGO recently hit the shelves. It’s author, Mike Doyle, is no stranger to the Lego community, having built the masterpiece seen on its cover. This is a book that shows pictures from most genres of Lego building and includes only scant text, serving the role of a coffee table book highlighting the inspiring creations by fans.
Here is my summary of the highlights of the book, which are elaborated in the review video below.
Pros:
- Professionally re-touched photos by the author himself
- Each creation is labeled with its title, builder, and year. Links to the builders’ galleries are included in the back of the book
- The first of its kind book illustrating the wide variety of what fans are capable of building
Cons:
- No coverage of trains and military creations!
- Not many features on minifig-focused creations, greater emphasis placed on creatures, characters, and microscale instead.
This is a highly recommended Lego book for any builder or fan. For new builders, this will serve as a compilation of inspiring models at your fingertips, and for experienced builders, this is a perfect way to show friends what you do. A book like this doesn’t need words to explain itself, the creations will do all the talking and delight all who’s curious to open its covers. Despite a major flaw of overlooking trains and military builds, Mike still does a great job of covering most aspects of the diverse styles and themes. His professional re-editing of the backgrounds of many photos gives the book a consistent style. You can buy it now from Amazon.
Green Dragon
I just got back from BrickCon and this beauty, from Tim Goddard (AKA RogueBantha), was waiting for me. Lovely, lovely work. The flexible neck and tail are nice, tight work and I’m very happy that he filled the wings in with actual plate rather than the paper or cloth solution that some people have used.
Gigantic Lego Helm’s Deep built with 150,000 bricks and featuring 2,000 minifigs.
I’ve seen some pretty impressive renditions of Helm’s Deep in Lego, but this gigantic layout by Goel Kim and Big J captures the scale of the epic battlescene like no other. The diorama took 6 months to build and over a year to plan. Check out more pictures on MOCpages and Flickr or you might miss a detail like this.
Salt on a wound
Those of you lucky enough to be at BrickCon will be seeing a sci-fi collaboration known as HUB 14. I have only seen a few teaser images on flickr but judging by who is involved I know it will be of epic proportions. For those of us unlucky enough to not be at BrickCon, Evan (Lego Junkie) was nice enough to rub it in and show us this brilliant little TurtleDove Spacecraft ahead of time. So thanks Evan for reminding us of all the cool stuff we are missing.
I want two of these on the second day of Christmas…and a partridge in a pear tree.
Fangs vs. Claws
Drill Man can certainly deal with bunnies, but I don’t know if he would fare so well if he came across this snake and scorpion on stroll through the desert. 74louloute builds this epic battle of nature for the ongoing competition with Sweetsha. The use of minifig legs for the snake’s tail is genius, as well as the head/face techniques on the scorpion…well pretty much all of this is genius actually.
Keep ’em coming guys.
An apple a day keeps the Strahl away.
Andy Baumgart (D-Town Cracka) is no stranger to military hardware. But his latest creation has a little sci-fi twist of the Maschinen Krieger variety. And it is rather brilliant.
The rough and tumble detailing coupled with the custom paint job/stickers makes this look right at home in the Ma.K universe. Even the name is perfectly suited for the genre.
And check out this blueprint edit…how cool is this?!
