This depiction of Beorn, the shape-shifting man from Tolkien’s The Hobbit, is quite striking. Adam Dodge has made something pretty unique here. I really love the symbolic look and feel of this piece. The beard is awesome and the bear is beautifully made. The pose of the bear as it reaches towards Beorn’s treasured horses is a great touch too.
Rod Gillies created this lovely steampunk harbor town for Brick2014 in London. I love the whimsical, compact look he has going on. It’s also got all kinds of motors and lights and what-not, as seen in this video taken at the convention. I love the use of the Lava Lamp. That’s some creative thinking outside the brick!
Check out the video as well!
I suspect the ongoing HARDnuary challenge will generate many more great builds before the month is out. But as we recently revealed, there already appear to be two ‘heavy hitters’ in the ring. For his latest entry, Carl Merriam decided to build a bunch of matches. That’s right, your eyes do not deceive you… The entire scene below is made from LEGO!
But Kosmas Santosa is no slouch, and responded by playing the nostalgia card with this equally stunning recreation of a vintage cassette recorder, complete with tapes.
This mask was up for grabs in a multi-site contest, designed to welcome back the Bionicle theme. Each of the sites involved ran a contest and the winners went head-to-head for the grand-prize.
Breann Sledge won the gold mask with this highly detailed bad boy, Akutahn the Makuta of Okoto. I think I detect a bit of Breann’s Alaskan roots in that name. Standing over 20 inches tall and loaded with all the awesome detailing and posability that we expect from Breann, this top-notch villain is totally a winner.
Check out the other incredible finalists after the break!
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Yesterday the 2015 Oscar nominations were announced, and The LEGO Movie was notably absent from the list of nominees for best animated feature. In response to this news, the movie’s writer and director Philip Lord tweeted “It’s okay. Made my own!” accompanied by a photo of a brick-built Oscar trophy. In reality, the uncredited creation was the work of brick artist Nathan Sawaya, although Lord did later admit that he just grabbed the image from a Google Image search.
LEGO fans everywhere were no doubt dismayed at the lack of an Oscar nod for this critically acclaimed and commercially successful movie. But later that very day, the critics themselves came to the rescue when the movie won Best Animated Film at the Critics Choice Awards!
As the saying goes… Every dark bluish gray cloud has a light bluish gray lining.
I’ve been horribly remiss in not yet blogging my favorite month of the year, Droneuary. To amend for this oversight, feast your eyes on some of the best from the first half of the month.
Andrew Lee has been a one-man drone factory, churning out a fantastic variety of civilian drones in all shapes and sizes. This rogue medibot is a particular favorite.
Pascal has brought his clean aesthetic to the month, with a number of group shots of multiple drones. I particularly like the alien look of this batch, and the nicely layered background kicks the whole photo up another notch.
Last but certainly not least, Forest King kicked off the month with this atmospheric scene of a drone striketeam conquering a rampart.
“These are not the bricks you’re looking for!” Given that this is only Aaron Fiskum‘s second build, we are very impressed. Using almost 3000 bricks and measuring about 2 feet (half a meter) in length, this Star Wars “X34” landspeeder was designed to match the scale and style of LEGO’s Ultimate Collectors Series (UCS) sets, that have become much coveted by LEGO’s more grown-up fan base.
Every detail has been faithfully recreated, right down to the very comfortable looking cockpit shown below. Make sure to check out Aaron’s Flickr album for loads more close-up shots.
This sweet low-slung ride by Jeff Churill looks ready to get into all manner of trouble, and do it with more than a bit of panache. Jeff started a business, Cooper Works, a year or two ago making stickers for LEGO models, and he’s proven that’s he’s got the building chops to put his own products to excellent use.
Modern architecture doesn’t have to be all about boxes clad in plate glass. Inaugurated last October in the Italian city of Milan, the Bosco Verticale is a experiment in eco-architecture: Two high-rise apartment blocks which incorporate live trees into every level. And now Glascow-based builder Elspeth De Montes has created the definitive LEGO version! Here it is, next to a picture of the original:
If NASA had done it as well as this version by duo Sean and Steph Mayo, maybe they’d have gotten away with it. Rarely am I a fan of non-LEGO elements added to a creation, but in this case the moon dust really takes this up a notch. The best detail here for me, though, is the brick-built tires (a combination of words which rarely refers to anything good).
Our resident Lemur recently got asked how contributors to this blog are selected. Of course, much of the process is top-secret, but I’m pretty sure a contributor should add something new and distinctive to the team, even if that something new and distinctive is a cute bushy tail and a willingness to take care of the paperwork. However, most of us share that we got into this because we like building our own models. Fan-built models are the bread and butter of this blog and knowing a thing or two about building definitely helps.
In the last two years, I have been working on a large collection of movie and TV vehicles. I have close to fifty of them now, but there are still plenty of cool and interesting examples left that I haven’t built yet. I already had a jet, but I did not yet have a helicopter, for instance. With Blue Thunder, that has now been rectified.
Blue Thunder was a fictional high-tech police helicopter that starred in the eponymous 1983 movie. Its pilot was played by Roy Scheider, who is probably better known for his role as the police-chief in Jaws. The movie lead to a short-lived TV series, which I used to watch religiously as a child. Although the plots of the episodes and the dialogue were undoubtedly cheesy, the helicopter was one of the coolest things ever. It didn’t talk or have a red light scanner bar, but it had a tail-mounted fan instead of a conventional tail rotor and a Gatling gun that was slaved to the pilot’s helmet. Two flyable helicopters were used in the filming: Aerospatiale Gazelles, painted in a largely dark blue colour scheme and modified with a nose-mounted pod housing sensors and the Gatling gun, an ‘armoured’ cockpit canopy consisting of flat panels and a few other gadgets.
The cockpit canopy was the trickiest bit of the build. Building a rectangular structure is fairly easy. Building something that is rounded is also doable, by stepping plates or by using combinations of slopes. Building a faceted structure, however, is just plain awkward and getting it more-or-less right took a lot of trail-and-error.
German builder Disco86 recently completed his triptych of builds focused on medieval Japan, for the 12th annual Colossal Castle Contest over at Classic-Castle.com. And I think it’s fair to say he saved the best for last, with this beautiful and colorful diorama. (Can you spot the lurking ninja?)
