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.

TBB cover photo: July 2015

Summer is here – and so is the Minions movie! Appropriately, the winner of our informal monthly TBB cover photo contest is this amazing spread of Minion variants by Oliver Kude. Utini!

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REMINDER ABOUT COVER PHOTO SUBMISSIONS: Please only submit photos that meet our guidelines and therefore stand a chance of being chosen. Do not use the cover photo group just to promote your latest MOC. It makes more work for us, and your spamming could get you blocked! If you want your MOC to get our attention, simply add it to the Flickr LEGO group. Or send us cupcakes.

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Around the World in 80 Days

One of the great joys of Brickworld is to see the massive collaborations that take place, and this year’s most ambitious and massive feat of LEGO engineering was VirtuaLUG’s Around the World in 80 Days:

Based off the movie and book, written by Jules Verne, it tells the story of the misadventures of Mr. Phileas Fogg, his manservant Passepartout and Inspector Fixx. Much like the Fogg, the tale of this group build stretches all around the world, with 25 contributors, bricks were sent from all over the United States, Canada, Belgium and even New Zealand to complete this masterpiece.

This build was an amazing 10 feet by 20 feet in size and a whole year of planning, organizing and building, not just LEGO bricks, but custom table and supports for the series of mosaics chronicling the 80 day adventure. It is made up of of 224x 32×32 stud baseplates littered with both minifgure-scale and micro-scale builds, several operating trains, and one big world – with spinning sign.

Our friends at Beyond the Brick take us through an in depth interview with the Project Leader Heath Flor about this layout:

You can see more details photos of this display in the Flickr Group

Guns don’t kill people... George RR Martin kills people

Winter is coming, and it’s adorable! This chibi-like White Walker by simplybrickingit reminds us that while the television version of Game of Thrones is over for another season, and all your favorite characters are now dead, there are other ways to get your GoT fix. Like building it in LEGO…

LEGO Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina 75052 [Review]

LEGO Star Wars Mos Eisley Cantina was released last summer and continues to be a popular Star Wars set. It retails for $69.99 and is available on Amazon. Below is a brief video review and my remarks regarding the set.

This is one of the more unique and iconic Star Wars sets that’s not a ship or features an overabundance of gray or black. It’s a neat playset with unique colors such as the flesh colored plates on the landspeeder. There’s also an above-average number of minifigs with exclusives such as the Bith musicians, Obi-wan, Greedo and sandtrooper. The landspeeder is similar to the previous design from 2010, but the use of the flesh color and decals are welcome changes. The cantina is much improved over the 2003 version, and with some more effort, you can certainly expand the cantina to its complete design like Joshua Morris has done. The 578 pieces included in the set is typical nowadays for a Star Wars set with a $70 tag, but it’s a more reasonable buy at less than $60.

Welcome to the Grid

This Tron diorama by Tim Schwalfenberg perfectly captures the glowing cybernetic world of Tron and even features a crisp and detailed interior where the party has just begun.

Cienasis 5 – An Oasis in the Oceans

I’ve always loved how builders would create a completely new world out of their imagination (including their own Technobabble) and realize them in bricks. Daniel Church created this Sci-Fi oceanic world of floating trading hubs, to serve as rest points for ocean going travelers:

The main barge is just chock full of details, from the wonderful solar panel and a fully built out trading bazaar on the deck.

Like many other builds at Brickworld, this particular layout is lit for the ‘World of Lights’:

Dan was also nominated for the ‘Best Sea Vessel’ for the Cienasis 5.

DOH-ceptively spacious

Although the LEGO Simpsons House makes a great display model, César Soares was unwilling to fork out the small fortune needed to own one. So instead he debigulated the design to create his own microscale version – complete with working garage door, pink car, and yard furniture. WOO-HOO!

X-Men: Days of Bricks Past

Builder Tim Lydy has a long history of building comic book creations, specifically Batman, including winning the 75th Batman Anniversary Contest last year at BrickWorld. This year Tim decided to jump over to the Marvel side after watching last year’s movie and build the Mutants’ most terrifying foe, the Sentinel:

But fear not Mutants! The X-men are on the case to protect Mutants everywhere! Here we see Storm with a functional spinning tornado and lightning blasts.

There’s also Nightcrawler who is teleporting around the Sentinel:

There are a few other X-Men floating around the scene – see if you can spot them!
There’s a more in-depth write up by Tim on Eurobricks.

And Tim also raised a good chunk of money at the Charity Auction and took home the Best Mecha Award for his amazingly articulated and lit Sentinel.

The axe man cometh

Even in the Bionicle universe people need to rock out once in a while. So meet Bio-Klaanian rock star Toa Kyberi, Toa of Sonic! This bad-ass was created by Finnish builder and master of the LEGO System/Bionicle mashup, Eero Okkonen. Read about this character’s full backstory on Eero’s blog.

If you wanna learn more about Eero’s unconventional character creations, or what it’s like to be a Finnish AFOL, check out my interview with him in Issue 31 of Brickjournal magazine.

LEGO 8 foot 9 inch Tower of Orthanc

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a MEGA Tower of Orthanc. The last one, by OneLUG, stood at a staggering seven feet tall. But records are made to be broken, and in this case in style.

Brendan M (LegoRyu42) has done the unbelievable making his 1/65th scale version almost two feet taller:

But what’s impressive isn’t simply the wonderful details and immense height, it’s that it has AN INSIDE (and here’s another picture for scale):

The tower is made from 9 individual stack-able sections, plus towery penthouse. All of which are wired for lighting. This tower was on display at Brickworld, and of course took home the Best Mega Creation award.

Check out the amazing gallery of all the little details in this mega creation.

Lego mosaic printer

The latest cool functioning creation from Jason Allemann is a Lego mosaic printer made completely out of official Lego elements. It uses a Mindstorms EV3 to scan an image and recreate it as a mosaic using 1×1 plates. Check out the video below or go to YouTube to learn how this creation was designed.

Emotional display

Pixar is already killing it at the box office with its new animation Inside Out. Angus MacLane wasted no time bringing us the perfect LEGO rendition of Anger. He then laid down the challenge for fellow builders to create the other emotions, to which Miro Dudas responded with this charming version of Joy. Let’s hope more emotions continue to surface (in the good way) in the near future!