Category Archives: LEGO

You’d probably expect a lot of the posts on a LEGO website like The Brothers Brick to be about LEGO, and you’d be right. If you’re browsing this page, you might want to consider narrowing what you’re looking for by checking out categories like “Space” and “Castle.” We’re sure there’s something here that’ll fascinate and amaze you.

Undulating wave of LEGO colors is completely mezmerizing [Video]

Berthil van Beek loves making some of the coolest LEGO machines around. Just a few week ago we highlighted his awesome LEGO ball maze that accelerates balls to 1,000 rpm, and he’s already back having spent more than 100 hours designing another breathtaking creation. This time, it’s an undulating wave of LEGO colors featuring 38 distinct swatches from LEGO’s palette (a palette that’s changing over the years).

Like Berthil’s ball maze, this mechanism is designed to fit with the Great Ball Contraption standard, fitting end-to-end with other fans’ creations for continual movement of LEGO’s tiny soccer balls and basketballs. Berthill tells us he was inspired to create the rainbow wave machine after seeing the vibrant rainbow of colors in the official image of LEGO’s Creator XXXL Box, which he also used a source for many of the colored bricks.

The Rainbow Wave Great Ball Contraption uses about 1,150 pieces and is powered by a single motor, with each of the colored pistons sitting on an 8-tooth gear. Each piston’s gear is exactly 1 tooth offset from its neighbors, and this means the balls travel in a perfectly level line as they move across the waving surface. Berthil says this mechanism took a lot of testing and redesigning to perfect, in particular because digital prototyping with LEGO rendering programs isn’t feasible for complicated moving machinery.

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A big gulp in little China

This lovely modular bar, created by Chinese builder Tony Toy, has a great deal of colour and style. Tony manages to pull the dark blue, red, green and gold together into an attractive modular-style building with some lovely architectural details. I especially like the red and orange lanterns hanging on the post outside the front of the building. The little white bridge over a pond is a nice touch and love the effect created by using transparent plates overlying green plates for the water.

Interestingly, it seems that Tony designed his creation digitally first using the free Lego Digital Designer application and then built it in ‘the brick’.

Something Hobbity this way comes

Built by david zambito for the ABS Builder Challenge, this snapshot from The Hobbit is terrific. This great scene has great use of the seed piece for the lid of the treasure chest and for Smaug’s fingers reaching over piles of gold. The best part for me is the tantalizing tiled tessellations on the floor surrounded by the creatively cracked and broken floor.

There’s no planet too hot for this rover

The FebROVERy competition is now in high gear, and all the cool and cute rovers have to squeeze together to make room for some (damn) hot vehicles. This vibrant black beauty by Stephan Niehoff can make any planet look good by just roving a quarter-mile on it’s surface.

This rover is so smooth and stylish, it’s simply impossible to ignore its rear view. Why choose huge mission emblems or side numbers when a couple of yellow stripes is all you need?

We are sailing

Not content with crafting beautifully curved brick-built hulls, Felipe Avalar has clearly spent ages getting the rigging and sails perfect on these two boats — the Amberle and the Eritria. Felipe says the below-decks areas on each vessel are stuffed full of Technic gears keeping all the lines at appropriate levels of tension. Such painstaking attention to detail is the hallmark of the best LEGO scale modelling — and these craft are great examples. I marvel at the skills of builders who create brick versions of real-world vehicles and buildings. Personally, I tend to build made-up fantastical things, because then nobody can tell me they’re not accurate!

A dialogue with the Man in the Moon, steampunk master Guy Himber [Interview]

This week we were fortunate enough to track down Guy Himber. Guy has worked extensively in the film industry with credits for special effects, creature mechanics, makeup and more. He is a prolific Steampunk builder and has authored a book on the subject entitled LEGO Steampunk. He runs the Iron Builder LEGO competition and has founded his own company, CrazyBricks, which manufacturers quirky, short-run, custom pieces compatible with LEGO. Let’s dive in and raid his brain!

TBB: What can you tell our readers about how you got into building with LEGO?

Guy: Like most folks I grew up playing with LEGO as a kid. Countless were the hours I spent building and rebuilding and sorting and blowing up my favorite plastic bricks. The dark ages kicked in around middle school and I didn’t do much with the bricks until I started using them to do some mechanical prototyping for animatronics in the Film Industry (mainly Technic bricks from my old collection). When my son was old enough I got him his first LEGO set and he took to the bricks like his old man and the two us started building more and more sets and then creating massive environments and Jurassic Parks. The fateful AFOL day arrived via a special trip to BrickCon in Seattle many years ago. That was the Con that got me bit by the LEGO bug again and started me building at a serious level.

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It’s elementary: uncanny character busts from Tyler Clites

We love the art of Tyler Clites for its bold style and perky colors. The way he treats common LEGO pieces always makes his characters vivid and lively, whether it’s some Star Wars protagonists or Tintin’s space rocket. Tyler’s every build has its own mood and a story to tell. And Tyler’s latest set of busts are simply jaw-dropping. This time it’s not just skillful building with LEGO bricks, but the pairing up of characters that makes these works so outstanding…

Click here for more characters

Come out, come out, wherever you are! [Instructions]

Even after six years, I still get requests for instructions to build the large Totoro that was part of my 2010 homage to the work of Japanese animator Hiyao Miyazaki. Sadly, that model is too large and complex to offer instructions, so instead here is a building guide for the medium Totoro that accompanied him. Of course, you don’t have to build him in the original medium blue; you can make him any color you like (or that your LEGO collection allows). I imagine this would make a lovely desk ornament for yourself, or gift for the anime-slash-LEGO fan in your life.

Click here to see an embiggened copy.

Designate a target and the Nautilus will light them up

Two years of hard work went into the construction of this 1.75 meter long spacecraft/gun platform built by Alexander Safarik. The size is impressive, but the plentiful interesting details and beautiful lines make his build one of the best LEGO spaceships I’ve seen. I don’t know how long I’ve scrolled back and forth studying the craft at the highest resolution, noticing another great parts usage or detail with each pass.

Be sure to explore Alexander’s Flickr album showing more views of his massive creation as well as photos detailing the building process over its two year construction.

Calls by candlestick

This elegant Candlestick phone looks well-suited to one of those very fancy, expensive offices, decorated in dark mahogany. Brick Classics has created this beautiful stylized phone, making great use of the ornate pearl gold wagon wheel as part of the receiver on the phone. The scale is deceiving, too – it’s fairly small, sitting on a small base.

Always pay attention when playing Pokémon GO

Pikachu better watch the road, since the outcome of Pokémon vs car generally doesn’t end well, as illustrated by Cecilie Fritzvold. The whole scene is well done. I like the (unfortunately very flat) Pikachu next to the line in the road. The tire gets great texture from the modified 2×3 pentagonal tiles. Let this stand as a PSA: pay attention when playing or walking in traffic!

Beer after wine, feel fine

At least, that’s the theory. I think. By the time I’ve had some wine I can never remember what I’m supposed to move on to next. Jimmy Fortel‘s latest might serve as some form of LEGO-mnemonic on my next night out. Regardless of its future usefulness, this creation sees bent tubing held in place with clips, giving a wonderful impression of line art.

This is a brick-built version of the logo of Jimmy’s local bar in Perpignan, France. Apparently they hosted a small exhibition of some of Jimmy’s artwork recently. As such, I think they deserve the LEGO community’s support — the next time you’re in that part of the world, swing past and buy some wine. And then some beer.