A good steak is hard for any carnivore to resist – no matter how rare it is – so I would probably take my chances to snag this one, and hopefully not get snagged myself in this menacing LEGO bear trap by Cecilie Fritzvold. This particular creation is part of the ongoing Iron Builder contest between Cecilie and Chris Maddison. Essentially they’re trapped (and constricted) to creatively using these Nexo Knights shields to showcase their building skills.
Marvel has been churning out one hit movie hit after another, and Dr Strange was another winner. Their refresh of timeless superheroes also inspires LEGO builders like Letranger Absurde to recreate these iconic characters in bricks. Geared up in his Cloak of Levitation and equipped with the Eye of Agamotto, there’s little that Dormammu, the supervillan on the big screen can do to outwit the brilliant Doctor. My favourite part of the build is actually how the nose cone elements in yellow are used to construct the gloved hands, and the white streaks of hair represented by radiator grille parts.
If there were ever a vehicle that deserved the UCS (Ultimate Collector Series) treatment, the DeLorean from Back to the Future is the one I think fans would be rooting for. As Doc Brown said, if you’re going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style? Korean builder 지현주 (Ji Hyun Ju) holds nothing back and puts in all the bells and whistles, from detailing on the dashboards and interior to a pair of working gull wing doors. The only question I have is who do I need to bribe in Billund to get one of these in released in a 4000 piece count set?
See more of this LEGO DeLorean
Students at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, including LEGO builder Rinse, had an opportunity to present a prototype satellite design to the European Space Agency (ESA) at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. With a LEGO builder among them, the student team used bricks as their design medium for constructing their 3D prototype. The LEGO model has a hexagonal shape, and the solar arrays don’t require any additional support to remain extended horizontally.
I once built an 11th century Romanesque castle from LEGO for a university humanities course. How have you used LEGO in your own higher education?
In her ongoing Iron Builder challenge, Cecilie Fritzvold has built a crumbling bridge. I always enjoy seeing decay built in LEGO, whether it’s fast like this one or a more tranquil style, which we often see in post-apocalyptic creations. What I also love is bridges, so Cecilie delivers on two of my soft spots at the same time.There are loads of details to be explored in this creation, like the great cracking effect or the subtle use of Nexo-Knights shield piece as the edge of the sidewalk.
If you want to see more great use of the Nexo Knights shield pentagonal tile (the “seed part” in their current challenge), be sure to check Cecilie‘s and Chris Maddison‘s Flickr pages.
The Hawker Typhoon, known by the RAF as Tiffy for short, was a British single-seat fighter-bomber, produced by Hawker Aircraft during World War II. Einon‘s LEGO version of the Typhoon features a fully retractable landing gear and carries eight rockets under the wings and two bombs. The real life bomber had a few design issues but Einon has managed to iron out some of these in his minifigure-scale version. The brick-built propeller is a good solution for sizing on this model but the invasion stripes on the upper wing surfaces and fuselage seal this as an accurate wartime Typhoon.
Einon has made a short video that not only shares more details about the Typoon, but also demonstrates his version’s retractable landing gear and how swooshable this LEGO bomber can be.
Mitch is not only seeing how much lime green can be put into one build, but also how many eyes. This bounty hunter, named Marq, has eleven of them cleverly created with the frying pan piece and circular 1X1 plates with a hole through the middle. Looking past all that lime green, I really like the use of the tread and linkage pieces to create some semblance of clothing.
It all started a few days ago when I saw a TV remote by Primož Mlakar‘s in my Flickr feed, with the description saying “I couldn’t imagine a TV without one :)”. I thought nothing more of it, only to be surprised later by teaser shots revealing the television set that needed the remote.
The TV’s general shaping is spot on, and nostalgic for anyone growing up with these old-school TVs. The antenna, the little channel display screen, and Sony logo are just perfect. The forced perspective Back to the Future II scene demands closer inspection. Primož tells us in the description that the layout was the starting point and was intended as a minifig scale diorama, but as he encountered some problems with scale, he decided to make a forced perspective build. Turning it into a television set was just the next logical step.
What, you thought I’d just go with “It’s a trap!”? That’d just be lazy. (Also, repetitive.) Admiral Ackbar may not have had the most memorable line in The Force Awakens, but his presence at the Resistance base marked another point in the movie that reminded us we were watching a true Star Wars film again. Master character builder Eero Okkonen captures the essence of the Mon Calamari admiral with a variety of slopes, vehicle fenders, reins, and other sundry bits.
A few pieces of brown lend subtle texture to what would otherwise be a mass of dark red. His expressive eyes are built from a black 2×2 boat stud layered over a round 2×2 yellow tile.
If you don’t have a couple hundred thousand dollars to spend on your own 1963 Porsche 911, you can always build one in LEGO. Michael Jasper has built a lovely 911 in black, reflecting all the iconic bulges and curves of the original. Much of the car’s sides are built studs forward, while the curves on the fully detailed underside are built studs down.
How do we know so much about the car’s interior structure? Because Michael has posted this (literal) cut-away view highlighting the complex techniques he used to achieve the vintage vehicle’s shaping.
The late Carrie Fisher had been scheduled to appear next month at Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Con, so I decided to make a Leia tribute for the convention’s Brick Nation display. We’ve already seen LEGO tributes showing a demure Princess Leia shoving a floppy disk into some poor hapless droid, but I wanted to recreate a moment from the original trilogy that captured Fisher’s feisty character! Jabba’s death scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi seemed appropriate (…ignoring for a moment the fact that this is basically a PG-rated movie that features a brutal and drawn-out murder scene)
When we last checked in with Tim Schwalfenberg, he’d just completed his massive LEGO diorama of The Last of Us. While considerably smaller, this crumbling statue of a horse and rider — both their heads knocked off ages ago — is no less atmospheric. Although Tim considers this a small build, it still feels like a monumental sculpture that evokes the glory of a long-gone era. The brown sign also adds an air of mystery — what does it mean? Is this in the distant past or a terrifying future?
