Paul T. goes old-school with this brick-built organic tank. The well-known Ankylosaurus may be an herbivore, but with armor plating and built in weapon in its tail, it’s spoiling for a fight. Paul’s clever creation incorporates the new inverted 2×2 dome brilliantly to comprise the armor plating. This is just the sort of awesome creation we want to see at our ChronCon display at Brickcon, where we even have a category for Fiercest Fighting Dinosaur!
Microscale and space colonies are a match made in the heavens. Karf Oohlu’s Colony Base Omega may be fighting for life on a foreign world, but it does so with panache. This slick modular sci-fi outpost looks fresh off the mothership and ready to get some terra formed.
In a city that never sleeps, only one superhero knows how to get things done. That superhero is Unibat! Or is it Battikitty? Well, whatever you call this adorable hybrid by Melanie F., it’s awesome. Built to the same scale as her other giant Unikitty versions (Seasick Unikitty is my favorite), Melanie’s Unikitty army is well poised for Unikitty dominance.
Here, Melanie poses with her original Unikitty for scale.
Last Thursday night, LEGO.com was so overloaded that many of us weren’t able to get through to order the new LEGO Ideas Exo Suit. My own order got stuck, but the good people at LEGO unstuck it without my even having to call them. Nice!
The experience was memorable enough for Rob D. (agaethon29) that he commemorated it with this little scene.
And in case you missed it, we really are giving away a copy of the set, lightly customized by our own talented Simon (your choice of his custom model or the set’s disassembled parts). Head on over and leave a comment to enter the raffle.
BrickCon 2014 is less than two months away — October 2nd through 5th in Seattle. Each year, starting with Zombie Apocafest 2008 and continuing through Big in Japan and Numereji 2421, The Brothers Brick sponsors a collaborative display for our readers. After five continuous years, we took a break last year, but we’re back this year with “ChronoCon 10,000 BC.”
The basic idea of ChronoCon is that it’s a convention for time travelers and time travel enthusiasts. We were inspired last year by the release of the official Back to the Future DeLorean and the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, but the great thing about a convention for time travelers is that it can be held any time! So, you know, we’re not a year behind schedule after all…
Chaos and anarchy are built into the underlying theme, so please don’t expect a lot of guidelines from us — the whole point is to get creative. We do expect intersecting timelines, anachronisms, and paradoxes, so the parking lot outside the ChronoCon venue will likely have multiple DeLoreans and a variety of TARDISes (bonus points for not arriving in a DeLorean or TARDIS).
That said, we have three very broad guidelines that will help pull the overall display together:
Here are the prize categories (subject to change, addition, and our whim):
There’s a ChronoCon 10,000 BC group on Flickr, where you can see photos we’ve collected so far of LEGO models consistent with the general idea, as well as discussion threads.
If you haven’t registered yet for BrickCon, do it now. And then get building!
Lino M. remains one of my favorite automobile builders, churning large-scale cars each month as part of LUGNuts challenges. For last month’s challenge, Lino built a Rolls-Royce Phantom II from the 1930s. The clean, elegant lines look like they’re ready to carry a Rockefeller or Carnegie to an evening at the Metropolitan Opera.
A good indication of a builder’s talent is that he or she attracts the attention of several of our contributors separately. When I first bookmarked this scene by Rickard and Helen, I hadn’t noticed yet that it was the same team that had built the despots and notables (posted by Carter), the South Park characters (posted by Ralph), or one of the top three BRICKNADO winners chosen by all of us.
It’s actually not unusual for a Town layout at a LEGO convention to have a trailer park on the edge (demonstrating that Town builders do, in fact, have a sense of humor), but it’s rare to see such a lovely trailer or range of amusing detail.
Given the horrors of World War I, our last post deserves an adorable chaser from the same era. LegoEng normally builds military models himself, but he took a break to build this 1910 Renault AG-1.
Getting the proportions of minifig-scale vehicles right can be very challenging, and this builder has accomplished it by going with an odd width — the cab is five studs wide and the narrow hood is only one stud wide (with tiles attached for greater width). The whole thing looks held together with clips.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of Germany’s declaration of war against France, drawing two of Europe’s largest nations into what would later be known as World War I. The “Great War” introduced numerous new and deadly military technologies, from fighter planes to tanks.
Talented Polish builder Ciamosław Ciamek (PigletCiamek) has built a triptych of highly detailed dioramas depicting three phases of World War I.
The first diorama, titled “Enthusiasm,” shows French citizens volunteering as the patriotic population admires the soldiers marching off to the front in 1914.
The second scene, titled “Awe”, illustrates the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, in which hundreds of thousands of men died.
Finally, Ciamek’s third diorama, titled “Glory”, shows the moment when German fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen (the “Red Baron”) was shot down in his famous red tri-plane in 1918.
Popular culture is filled with many iconic fictional spacecraft, but relatively few factual ones. But to anyone old enough to remember Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos, or young enough to have enjoyed its more recent incarnation, the image below will stir up many fond memories!
It is of course a NASA Voyager probe, faithfully recreated in LEGO by Ryan H (eldeem)…
Launched in the 1970’s, NASA’s Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft were actually the first to explore the outer solar system, and the first to carry a message for any aliens that might encounter them. But the later Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes gained much more notoriety, with their more ambitious missions and superior imaging capabilities. Even the “message from Earth” got an upgrade, from a simple plaque, to a recording containing images and sounds from Earth (which you can even see in Ryan’s model above).
Lasting more than a decade, the Voyager missions were much longer than anything the public were used to at that time. Every few years one of the spacecraft would reach its next target, and the world would be caught up in Voyager fever all over again, as amazing images of far-off worlds flooded our screens. Still transmitting to this day, the Voyager probes are among the most distant man-made objects in existence, and are now at the very edge of the solar system, headed for interstellar space.
Ryan’s Voyager is a commission for the University of Colorado, and will be on display at the CU Heritage Center from mid-September. Go check it out!
LEGO sent The Brothers Brick a copy of the new LEGO Ideas 21109 Exo Suit, which we’re going to give away to one of you out there reading this. Read the full review to find out how!
There have been a lot of great LEGO CUUSOO / LEGO Ideas sets that have come out, but before the Exo Suit they all had one thing in common: they were all based on someone else’s design (intellectual property or IP in licensing jargon). So it was a great to see Pete Reid‘s Exo Suit become the first original idea to be turned into a LEGO Ideas set.
The set comes in a typical small form LEGO Ideas box. I thought the designers did a great job on graphics and background art, which is very reminiscent of the classic space box art.
When you open up the set you’re presented with a fantastic instruction manual and 4 small bags of pieces, which include a total of 321 pieces. While it might not seem like a lot of pieces, the final build is surprisingly large.
The instruction booklet starts off with some info on Pete and Senior Set Designer Mark Stafford on how they collaborated on the set. It’s followed by a great background story that sets up the Exo Suit. I also liked how scattered throughout the instructions are little tid-bits of information about the Exo-Suit or the turtle, which just adds a bit of fun to the whole building.
Originally I had planned to go over the actual build process and point out interesting bits and details on the Exo Suit, but as I was actually building it, I decided not to ruin everyone’s fun — I would rather everyone experience it on their own. I will say that there are definitely some uncommon techniques that you would not find in your typical LEGO set. An example of which is placing a 1×1 round stud in the center of a 2×2 round plate (see picture).
The piece selection in this set is also a bit odd for a typical LEGO offering. There are a lot of ball-joint pieces that makes up the bulk of the frame, and a lot of tiny detailing elements that are attached to it, which makes up the rest of the set. But for a lot of builders this gives a great value: it is a small set with an incredible selection of specialized sci-fi “greeble” pieces.
But really, the stars of the set are the two Classic Space minifigures (with extra air tank) available in green for the first time:
The inclusion of these two figures, plus the low price point, and limited run will likely result in a very high demand set. Which is unfortunate as I would love to be able to buy a massive stockpile of these to get an army of Green Classic Space men, with enough left over pieces to build something really cool.
Read the review and enter for a chance to win this set →
Paul Hetherington (Brickbaron) is the master of incorporating moving elements into dioramas. His Fabuland Fun Fair display shows a colorful theme-park featuring dozens of Fabuland characters and a slew of animated carnival attractions. The YouTube video below is a must-see.
