What could stir the heartstrings of LEGO Classic Space fans more than a motorized monorail? How about TWO monorails and an epic station bustling with intergalactic travelers? That’s just what Martin.with.bricks delivers in this stunning diorama that combines Classic Space with modern techniques and minifigs at a truly epic scale.
All aboard the monorail for more pics of this epic space diorama!
Builder Jan the Creator returns from a LEGO hiatus with a delicious little build of the big D himself, Dionysus, spending all day long on the chaise longue. Combining the new Tiefling horned hairpiece with the Nexo Knight torso, faun legs, and devil tail, is an inspired combination. But the real star of the scene is the furniture, especially the table, modeled on the Stately End Table from LEGO Fortnite. It’s a wonderful use of the diadem accessory and a reminder that every piece of furniture in the LEGO Fortnite game can be built with real elements.
For a lot of treasure hunters, the real treasure was the great LEGO builds we found along the way! This build by Eli Willsea portrays a pair of adventurers delving deep into a empty desert ruin, but what it really shows off is a trove of fantastic building techniques! Down on the floor of the lost well the cracked tiles are made from the immensely useful cheese slope, but did you notice they’re embedded in 1x2x3 windows? On the back wall, Eli uses those windows again with minifigure brackets as decoration. Finally, if you take a look at the well itself, you’ll see that it’s a combination of cheese slopes and 1×1 bricks with sideways studs which fit so well inside an 8×8 dish!
Treasure Planet features some of the best action and artistry to ever come from the House of the Mouse, and in a just world would have been proudly featured in one of the many LEGO collabs of last year. Alas, it’s mostly remembered as the studio’s biggest box office misfire with nary a collectible Minifig to remember it by. For Daniel Church, the film’s mix of nautical adventure and cosmic spectacle remains a wellspring of inspiration. After many years of building sci-fi sails and futuristic ports, he took on his dream project: recreating Treasure Planet’s signature ship, the RLS Legacy, in LEGO. Standing 40″ tall and 39″ long and assembled from over 3000 pieces, the results are a stunning display of LEGO craftsmanship and a fitting tribute to an amazing design.
Sail on to appreciate the Legacy from other angles !
After an intense day of training for ninja exams, nothing satisfies like a bowl of miso ramen with chashu pork and all the trimmings. This life-size ramen bowl in LEGO from H.Y. Leung, inspired by the signature dish from Ichiraku Ramen in the Naruto anime, looks delicious enough to slurp up. From the perfect marbling of the chashu pork, to the ripples in the opaque broth, to the prominent jelly-textured egg, to the careful arrangement of bamboo shoots and spring onion, Leung’s creation is the idealized form of a bowl of ramen. The naruto fish cakes employ a novel technique of red whips on 3×5 cloud plates. The ornamentation and kanji wringing on the bowl are reproduced beautifully in bricks. Leung’s best trick is the chopsticks, cleverly suspended and decorated with rune tiles. Even more impressive, they hide a play feature, sliding up and down as they pull noodles from the bowl!
The creak of rusted metal. The faint groan of boardwalk underfoot. The whine of the wind. All these sounds come to mind when I look at this atmospheric LEGO Western scene by Oshi (called “The Frontier”). Violence is about to break out on the streets of this dusty town, with the sheriff and his two deputies keeping their eyes on the outlaw and their guns at the ready.
While the scene is clean and detailed, the build itself is simple enough without many flashy elements, at least until you notice the way the siding on the building is slanted subtly outward to give it a realistic texture. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look. See if you can spot how the builder accomplished the effect:
Here’s a quick LEGO Star Wars vignette that features neat build techniques and super original droid designs. Tim Goddard tells us that the low-ranking Jostoc has been tasked with climbing into the underbelly of some ship somewhere to catalog the wild and weird droids that have been occupying that space unsupervised and unhinged for some time now. Sounds like the start of a good sci-fi/horror adventure!
Nine years ago this week, Undertale was released, going from a scrappy Kickstarter-funded passion project to one of the most beloved indie games of all time. The RPG “where no one has to get hurt” challenged what it means to be a game hero and won hearts with its humor, soundtrack, and memorable characters. Builder and LEGO photographer GlimpseGlow brings four key characters to life in brick form, capturing their pixel charm in miniature. First up is Asriel Dreemurr. And look! He brought flowers. How lovely.
Click to see more of the Undertale cast in LEGO!
It may take a long time to say anything worth saying in Old Entish, but you can describe this LEGO Ent by brickbuiltjosh in just one word: impressive. Treebeard (aka Fangorn) of The Lord of the Rings carries Merry and Pippin on his shoulders, probably a few stanzas deep into a really long song about leaves or something. His bark-like skin is captured in a wonderfully organic way, full of whips, curved elements, and dinosaur tails. His hands are handlebars, allowing for his fingers to spread. Each piece is arranged into an asymmetric whole that just works. Treebeard’s pose conveys a ponderous sense of weight and motion. According to the designer, large ball joints form the knees, hips, and shoulders, while his elbows are brick-built double hinges.
The LEGO creations of Qian Yj aren’t just remarkable achievements in building with bricks. They transport the admirer to another place or time, whether at minifig or 1:1 scale. For his latest build, Qian creates a lifesize LEGO birdcage and its smol birb occupant. The mix of colors soars, especially the pairing of gold and bright blue. A simple 2×1 grille plate is fresh and exciting when used in abundance in an unfamiliar context. For the birdcage’s gold bars, Qian uses piano wires from the LEGO Ideas Grand Piano. As beautiful as the model is, I’m glad to see the small red songbird enjoying life outside the cage. Good birb.
I’ll always hold a flame for the Ice Planet 2002 LEGO theme, with its rovers, satellites, and neon chainsaws, but aside from one raised baseplate in Ice Station Odyssey, we never got to see any actual ice for tunnelators to tunnel through. Uncharted Fabrications presents a modernized take on an Ice Planet base with no shortage of frozen terrain. I love how the asymmetrical ice spills over a rectangular patch of sea. The base entrance is well-integrated into the ice with some nice SNOT building techniques for the door and platform. Splashes of grey and yellow supplement the theme’s classic combo of white, blue, black, and trans-neon orange. Of course, this being Ice Planet 2024, the builder includes a pair of the new collectible minifigures and their penguin pals, who seem right at home on the ice.
Thanks to the newly-released Dungeons and Dragons Collectible Minifigures, filling out your LEGO scenes with fantasy races and epic loot is easier than ever. Kamil Karpiński picked up a couple of Aarakocrans (aka birdfolk, aka “Jarnathan”) and using just 13 tiny elements built new legs to amplify their avian qualities. As wings and quivers clash, Kamil gives his ranger a hip solution.
Kamil’s fantasy-focused creations show how even minifigures can become the foundation for clever building techniques. (His take on Sauron rules them all!)