Jongno Tower is a unique office building in Seoul designed by architect Rafael Viñoly and completed in 1999. bigcrown85 has faithfully recreated the structure in LEGO, with extensive use of transparent blue bricks. Similarly, the outer structural elements of the building use numerous LEGO struts, demonstrating that repetition is often a key element of achieving a real-world look in a LEGO creation.
Even the trees at ground level use some interesting techniques.
Tim Schwalfenberg worked on a massive Homeworld-inspired fleet of LEGO spaceships leading up to Brickworld Chicago last month, and we posted a couple of the great ships that make up the fleet, including the corvette and missile frigate. The full fleet is incredibly impressive, with the addition of a battleship and carrier.
The carrier is worth a closer look in particular, with a red and white color scheme that ties it together with the rest of the fleet, along with a shock of yellow. Tim has incorporated some custom 3D-printed elements into the greebles. Can you spot them?
Tim hasn’t posted photos of his battleship yet, but we’ll bring that to you as well once he gets the photos online.
Portal has been among the most mind-blowing games for me, and I couldn’t get enough of it in two episodes. While we wait for Valve Corporation to come up with a third, we should entertain ourselves with hiqh quality LEGO creations. Evan skillfully sculpted Chell and a sentry turret over a very Portal-esque base. Crispy photography and an Aperture Laboratories logo really show off the model. Still, some fans expect to see the Companion Cube and maybe a piece of cake to go along with Evan’s work. Perhaps we’ll see them some other time!
[Editor’s note: You might not notice this, but The Brothers Brick has contributors from all over the world — not just the US and Canada, but also the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey. Tonight, our thoughts are with the author of this post, Ankara resident Cagri Yuz, his family and friends, and all his fellow citizens of Turkey during this tumultuous time. Stay safe, Cagri!]
Check out this beast of a biker by Serbian builder Djokson. The bike is fabulous, with some nice Bionicle parts use to create the fuel tank and wings at the rear, and a wonderfully-detailed engine nestling within the frame. But the hog rider is the main attraction — a great piece of character-scale building with an expressive face and good use of different colors to clearly suggest a biker jacket and jeans. Great stuff.
Excellent brickwork by LEGO 7 lends character to this brick-built portrait of Gargamel, the villain from The Smurfs. The face is great, but the posing of the arms and fingers give a real sense of the figure’s creeping motion…
Just exactly what Gargamel was going to do if he ever found the Smurf village was never entirely clear to me as a child. At various points I think he wanted to destroy them, eat them, or turn them into gold. His greatest achievement, of course, was the inadvertent creation of Smurfette — something for which I think the male Smurfs, previously starved of female company, should offer a vote of thanks.
LEGO 7 has also built Azrael, Gargamel’s long-suffering cat…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing a ridiculous amount of Fallout Shelter on my iPhone while riding the bus to and from work. Just as I was thinking it was time to move on to something else, the developers added quests this week that let you guide your vault dwellers as they explore locations beyond the confines of your underground world. This dilapidated house by Joshua Brooks looks exactly like the sort of place I’d send a trio of my strongest dwellers into to find legendary crafting items.
Joshua has included a vehicle for his survivors to get around in, which is more than can be said for my poor dwellers who have to walk everywhere across the wasteland. Here’s hoping that green tank has some gas they can siphon out. The cheese slope roof is lovely, with great cracks in the building’s walls. The house also has a full interior, with reminders of a better world destroyed by a human race gone mad.
At a recent LEGO convention, Ivan Angeli and Mihai Marius Mihu were watching their displays, and happened to have some brick on hand, so they set to building. Talented builders both, together they produced this breathtaking Faerie Dragon in a single afternoon. I love creations built almost entirely of transparent elements. Many of the intricate elements builders grow to rely upon for complex techniques are unavailable in transparent hues, and many unusual pieces are.
One of my favorite minor characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books is Radagast, a wizard like Gandalf and Saruman who cares for the plants and animals of Middle-earth. I really kind of hated how Peter Jackson blew up The Hobbit into a bloated monstrosity of a movie trilogy, but I did deeply enjoy the extended screen time that Radagast had. Who can fault a sled towed by a team of enormous rabbits, handled by a man with birds’ nests in his hair? Real-life Middle-earth resident David Hensel recently built this enormous version of Rhosgobel, the house in Mirkwood where Radagast lives, for the Christchurch Brick Show this weekend.
The largest LEGO creation he has ever built, David says that the build includes twenty to twenty-five thousand LEGO bricks, and measures 77 cm (30 inches) on each side.
Click through to see more of this amazing LEGO model!
Talented Hong Kong LEGO builder Alanboar Cheung honeymooned with his wife in Kyoto, where the newlyweds visited Kiyomizu-dera, an early Buddhist temple founded in 778 AD, with the current buildings dating to the 17th century. Alanboar has commemorated their trip as a gift for his wife with this beautiful LEGO creation. Chock full of details depicting elements of Japanese culture, the whole creation sits on a brick-built scroll, complete with a calligraphy brush in front.
The model features the main temple building on its hill, the accompanying pagoda, and the waterfall that gives the temple its name. In addition, Alanboar included LEGO recreations of his favorite memories, from Kumamon (the mascot of Kumamoto Prefecture, which is nowhere near Kyoto) waving Japanese flags beneath cherry blossoms and a trio of Children’s Day carp flying above to a beautiful princess on a bridge overlooking a couple basking in a hot spring (sadly without any snow monkeys).
There’s a lot going on here, so be sure to check out more photos on Alanboar’s blog. And if you enjoy this, you’ll also appreciate Alanboar’s LEGO mosaic of Hokusai’s “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” we featured here a few months ago.
SPARKART! used around 2200 carefully selected and arranged LEGO pieces to create this model of the MS-06R High Mobility Type Zaku II from the anime/manga Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt, a gritty, violent, and dramatic sci-fi space war story. The model is about 1 foot wide, 1.5 feet high, and 1.5 feet long (30cm X 45cm x 45cm).
This weeks obligatory dose of Neo Classic Space is called the White Tiger, and comes to us from Italian builder Andrea Lattanzi. It’s a pleasant departure from the norm in that it follows the color scheme of the Futuron sets (sometimes commonly referred to as Whitetron, since their counterparts were the ever-popular Blacktron).
Andrea has even built this tank its own maintenance bay, where we can see its Futuron operators directing a bunch of Classic Space regulars as they re-fit it for it’s next Blacktron encounter:
Stu Pace wanted to try something different when he built his LBA-10 Long Range Heavy Fighter and I think he succeeded. While the physical design of the ship has the same strong ‘alien’ feel as many of his previous spacecraft, the unconventional color blocking really takes things to the next level, emphasizing interesting features of the ship’ that might have gone unnoticed under a more monochromatic color scheme. It’s a bold move but I think it works!
