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.

Don’t leave me hanging

One of the hottest LEGO fads right now is tensegrity sculptures. These builds use tricky physics to create models with sections suspended in mid-air with no obvious means of support. I’ve seen a lot of different approaches, but captainsmog has come up with one of the best. Invocation features a giant flying dragon, suspended in the air by taut lengths of LEGO chain. There’s no Photoshop trickery here. It’s just science. But I’m willing to admit there’s just a bit of magic, too.

Even if there wasn’t mind-bending suspension going on, this would be a great build to look at. The dragon’s belly is constructed of minifigure arms, creating an eerie organic feel to that armor. And the invocation platform is pretty swanky, too. I like the use of minifigure beards to create different versions of drippy candle wax, and the use of glow-in-the-dark tile for lines of mystic power is inspired. There are even tiny little touches, like the candle flames all blowing outward from the downdraft from the dragon’s wings. I love that attention to detail.

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

Just a pile of parts? These giant LEGO pieces are the perfect illusion

Did you do a double take? Same here! If you’re still confused, zoom in. This is the most exceptional upscale of LEGO pieces I have ever seen. Prolific builder Inthert has pulled off a bit of genius with this latest creation. While every element is expertly crafted, a few stand out as top notch. Minifigure parts, for example, are one of the hardest things to build, but including one was a must. Yet among many piles of unsorted brick are not one but two torsos, and one’s even holding a lightsaber. These torsos are identifiable from both distance and up close, and Luke’s even incorporates string to finish the illusion. Moving on, there’s a cheeky tribute to the “brittle reddish-brown” epidemic, which couldn’t be more spot-on. (Rest in pieces, 1×3 plate!) But my most favorite detail has to be the black airtanks with the flexible hose “neck bracket” wrapped around a brick stud.

Something else to marvel: there is not a single exposed real top stud among the brick-built copycats. Now, if you’ve been bitten by the upscale bug, you can see more enlarged LEGO elements in our archives. You can also check out more builds from Inthert.

Lime Drop

LEGO car builder Tony Bovkoon has done something you don’t see much of. You take a Volkswagen lime and white T1 campervan, drop the stance, move the rear engine to about mid-chassis and give the whole shebang a dropside bed. Fenders bring some of that lime color to the rear of the build and a keg-style fuel tank in the bed finishes out the look. This is the kind of thing that only makes sense in dreams. My dreams anyway, and probably a few of Tony’s. If you’re interested in having the kind of dreams Tony and I have, here’s a thematic tie-in that might get you started.

The doors open, it has a fully detailed interior and all the niceties you can expect from a LEGO vehicle of this scale. This photo best illustrates the engine, truck axle, and ground scraping stance.

Leave it to the beaver

I grew up in the state of Oregon, USA, where the beaver is our state animal. I also attended Oregon State University, where Benny the Beaver is our school mascot. So I guess I have a bias for these buck-toothed builders. When I saw this cute little guy, built by Miro Dudas, I had to write about it. Now, it’s not just because this animal is significant for me; it’s nicely done. The aspen tree looks great and using legs for paws gives it organic character. The most clever part: using leg hips for teeth!

Miro does a great job with LEGO wildlife, like this quiet fox, a curious bear cub, and a gorgeous stag.

A canopy as tasty as a canape

These are challenging times. I’m pretty sick of hearing that. Even more, I’m pretty sick of living it. But occasionally…occasionally…challenges can be pretty great, too. I mean, it’s hard to be too grumpy when great LEGO builders challenge each other and we get to look at the sweet, sweet results. One such outcome is the 4-D4 Recon & Fighter Craft built by Inthert. Challenged to build a ship around a specific 10x4x3 canopy in under 48 hours, the resulting ship still looks like it took months of work.

The orange version of the canopy is lifted from 2007 Mars Mission theme, but that’s not the only callback. The black, white, and orange color scheme is also a direct tribute, as are those orange wheels. The curve to the front of the ship is the result of some very tricky building, but it’s the triangular bracing at the ends of the arc that makes me smile the most. Or maybe it’s those tank treads. Or the texture and pattern from those grey wedge plates. It’s hard to make a choice. It’s all just so tasty.

Anyone else suddenly hungry for a re-release of Mars Mission?

Blessed brick Jubilee Church is a divine achievement

ARK.builds’ 1:125 scale model of the Jubilee Church in Rome is a stunning facsimile with its accurately recreated curved walls, a supremely technical feat.

I’m just blown away by this model; there’s complexity in representing a very organic real-world building and ARK.builds made it look easy. With such a complicated exterior I didn’t expect to see was any kind of interior, but he’s done it up complete with pews, organ, altar, and cross.

I asked the builder how these stunning curved walls were achieved and he shared the photo below. It looks incredibly fiddly with multiple hinges but it certainly got the job done.

April showers bring May flowers, right? Right?

Perhaps it has been all this time indoors. Maybe it’s the fact that it has been raining a bunch, and I have small children who cannot be kept out of the mud by anything short of shock collars (which I have not tried, for the record). But when I see this build by why.not?, I get the feels. It’s sad and grey, with only dark and dingy colors, just like an afternoon of re-runs of Clifford the Big Red Dog with toddlers with rain pouring down outside. While I love the rocks made from the huge pieces, and the decrepit shrine is well done, too, it’s the rain that strikes me most with this build. The brick-built sky, with the slanting dark grey raindrops against the light grey clouds, is melancholy enough, but the dark tan water, with tiles inserted at differing depths to simulate raindrops plunking onto the surface, really brings the effect home. Golly. Are those really raindrops, or just my tears?

Taking social distancing to the extreme

Some folks are handling this whole social distancing thing better than others. Some dislike it so much that they’ve picketed outside of empty statehouses in large groups with guns and misspelled signs demanding the end to all this safety lockdown hoopla. While you’re mulling over that sound logic, allow me to present a guy who has no problems with social distancing. Harold, the hermit, has lived peacefully atop a rocky island for many years. He’s been doing this for so long, LEGO builder valerius_maximus goes on to say, that the rock supporting his little home has just about eroded away. Soon he’ll have to find another ramshackle hideaway or risk toppling ass-over-tea-kettle into the drink. (As they say in New England.) But for now, the fishing is good, the carrots look like they’re just about ready for harvesting, and Harold has all the friends he needs. Seagulls are friends, right?

Isn’t it about time?

This orange, perfectly balanced scale by Joe incorporates microscale vignettes representing the effects of time. There are several details to hunt for and appreciate here — check out the teeny tiny tree trunks on the mountain side of the scales, and the really subtle shaping about a third of the way up from the base of the clock achieved with minifig chairs placed top-to-top.

Will anyone trade me two bricks for one sheep?

I’m trying to build the longest road here, folks. I need those bricks. Anyone who has ever played the board game The Settlers of Catan will instantly relate to this build by Cab ~, with the hexagonal board tiles and the wooden game pieces. This one is built in three dimensions, however, and with LEGO bricks. Impressively, the whole scene is LEGO, including the cards in the background, the table, and the dice. I happen to love mosaics, and the work that went into those cards is well worth it. I also love Catan, so this build has me wanting to have a game night. The only problem is the social distancing. Maybe if we all sit six feet apart it will work…

It’s also an entry to the Iron Forge, the open-to-all-comers entry competition to the famous Iron Builder, so you can see lots of minifigure legs in the build. They give the hexagons their distinctive shape. I also love the clips for the sheep’s grass and the grille tiles for wheat. Now if only I had built my settlement on the bricks.

She called me a steed

Contests bring out a different side in builders. I cut my teeth in the LEGO world making fantasy-based castles and the like over in the Guilds of Historica on Eurobricks, but for contests I have been building out of my comfort zone. First there was some Star Wars builds last May, then more recently a Neo-Classic spaceship, a pirate ship, a butterfly, and a bird. They’re quite different from what I got used to building, and they required different approaches. Most recently, I (Benjamin Stenlund) built an American Mustang, and no, I’m not talking about the muscle car, but about the horse that roams some parts of the Western USA. Though maybe I’ll build some cars soon, too, just for kicks.

Building him (and he is a male, if you look closely, a stud stallion) required patience in shaping like grey castle walls don’t. A plate or two of difference in the legs, the angle of the head, the girth of the chest, all these things required fine tuning and frequent adjustments. I built the head first, because if you start with the body, scaling the head to it becomes a nightmare (or is it a night stallion?), but even so I had to redesign the body multiple times. And pulling apart reddish brown pieces is a harrowing experience, never knowing when one could snap. And then supporting the weight of the whole horse with the tail required some Technic structure; I admit I fudged it a bit, and things did not quite line up, but it’s a custom creation and not an official set, so who cares? It was built for the studless category of the Style it Up contest (hence I made a stud) but I threw in some gratuitous minifigure-leg cacti to enter it into the Iron Forge, too. Now hopefully I can go back to building castles for a while…

Quiet solitude

Sometimes it’s all about getting the right camera angle… And maybe some fantastic vaulted ceilings. This monochrome shrine, built by David Hensel, is an exceptional marriage of LEGO architecture and photography. The lighting gives the whole scene a sense of somber and noble peacefulness. And the way that the pieces mesh together provides an element of age. It’s bold yet austere. If you have never tried to build curves like this, take a crack at it. This style requires a patient hand!

David recently made another completely different monochrome build. This time photography comes into play in a different way. Also take a look at some of these other awesome monochrome creations in our archives.