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.
LEGO has provided us details for a new product line called LEGO BrickHeadz, coming in 2017, which allows builders to “create, collect and display versions of iconic characters and superheros out of classic LEGO bricks and elements.”
The first versions will be unveiled at San Diego ComicCon (SDCC) next week, where fans can get a sneak peak at this upcoming line.
Captain America and Iron Man
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!
Wait…I know what you are thinking, The Brothers Brick lets another sister start blogging and she gets distracted and starts posting about fashion and sewing machine techniques! Look again: the items adorning this table are life-sized scale models all built with LEGO bricks. The Singer sewing machine, glasses, scissors and tailor’s chalk are very accurately depicted using LEGO as part of an exhibition called the Tiong Bahru Show by The Brick Collective that took place at Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore.
Another scene from The Brick Collective show is a typical cafe in the 1980s with some snacks, drinks and the classic Coca-Cola sign on the wall. When I say typical, clearly this is location dependant as Green Spot, Egg tarts, Siew Mai were not on the menu in my hometown of Glasgow, Scotland in the 1980s.
If you want a closer look and images of further scaled LEGO builds that appeared in the show, then you will find more within crayonbricks album on Flickr.
Link is the main protagonist in the best selling roleplaying-puzzle-action franchise The Legend of Zelda. This LEGO model of Link by Nathanael Kuipers accurately depicts him characteristically wearing a green tunic and pointed cap. The shaping is excellent, especially the facial features and his green tunic. Nathanael has also taken the time to build the details into Link’s shield and sword using bricks rather than any printed parts – nice attention to detail. It’s a perfect use of the Nexo Knights blade for Link’s sword in this build.
This links nicely on to another LEGO version of the same Zelda character. In this version Koen has rebuilt his previously featured Kirby, the eponymous character from another Nintendo videogame series. Kirby has the in-game ability to inhale enemies, thereby gaining characteristic abilities from them. Clearly by inhaling Link, Kirby has gained the ability to wield a huge sword and wear a green pointed hat without looking like one of Santa’s elves! A lovely fun build.
