He made his list. He checked it twice. This morning you found out if you were naught or nice. Last night, Santa Claus came to town.
To celebrate, Chris McVeigh (powerpig) gives us more wonderful works in his fabulous line of sketches.
The Most Famous Reindeer of All
He’s a Mean One
Santa’s house, built by Gary Davis (Bricksforbrains), shows preparations for Christmas in full swing, with the elves preparing toys to be delivered to delighted children all over the world. Santa may live in a rustic-looking cabin, but in Gary’s world his whole set-up looks like it could teach amazon a few lessons.
The elves aren’t running around sorting packages by hand. That work is done by a Rube Goldberg-type contraption (or Heath Robinson, if you’re British) that sorts and packages them before delivering them to Santa’s sleigh. This operation is run by computer from ‘Mission control’ and Santa himself sits behind a desk communicating via his smart-phone. Gary is a big fan of Gerry Anderson’s work, including Thunderbirds, and I think it shows. Merry Christmas.
Disney’s latest hit Frozen has such fantastic characters–Olaf being one of them. His wish is to see summer time (and it’s DEFINITELY close to summer-time weather here in Florida). In his words, winter’s a good time to stay in and cuddle, but put him in summer and he’ll be a….happy snowman.
Joe Meno‘s brilliant Olaf took his WALL-E towel down to the beach to catch some of those rays:
You can see Joe’s process and progress in his Flickr gallery!
I may not recognize the specific character, but the sculpting and sheer personality completely caught my eye. According to Jimmy (6kyubi6), this here is Lucky Luke, and he’s know as the man who shoots faster than his shadow. He’s from a Belgian comic series, which is set in the American Old West.
I admit it–I don’t have the foggiest idea on how to pronounce the title of this fabulous bridge. So I’m not going to try. James Pegrum (peggyjdb) probably can. Either way, this lovely little bridge tells a story of a town’s annual tradition of jumping off a bridge.
It was inevitable, really. We’ve blogged hot rods and a full size LEGO car before and British LEGO-Technic enthusiast Simon Burfield built a working Lego vehicle large enough to carry a person a while ago (which we sadly neglected to blog at the time), but now there’s an actual full-size drivable LEGO hot rod, large enough to carry two people. This crazy contraption was built by Australian Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida, from Romania.
About half a million bricks were used in the construction. The wheels aren’t made out of LEGO elements, obviously, and neither are a few of the other structural bits. The engine, however, is built with no fewer than 256 LEGO pneumatic pistons, which are powered by compressed air and can propel the car to a speed of about 20 km/h. According to Steve he is neither a car enthusiast nor a Lego enthusiast, which makes me wonder just how big things get if he is enthusiastic!
Via the BBC. Thanks to billyburg for the suggestion.
Don’t worry if you don’t know what a Schwibbogen is – I didn’t either. As builder Robert H. kindly explains, it’s a type of traditional German Christmas decoration in the form of an ornate candle holder. Robert’s full-size LEGO Schwibbogen is modeled after a famous one, and depicts artisans at work.
Adam Grabowski (misterzumbi) is usually quite laconic in his posting, so you can tell he’s excited about his latest LEGO work by the length of the accompanying prose. In short, he has recreated the famous Rat Fink by Ed Roth. And he’s done so with the help of some paint to make sure he got RF as close to source as he possibly could. Enjoy!
It’s amazing what one can do with eleven pieces of carefully chosen LEGO and a lot of creativity. Chris Maddison brings his [insert sporting cliche here] to the e11even pieces challenge with this clever and compact rendition of rock, paper, scissors.
41035 Heartlake Juice Bar is one of the 2014 Lego Friends sets. The set contains 277 pieces and retails for $29.99, which you can buy from Amazon.
Here is my summary of the highlights of the set, which are elaborated in the review video below.
Pros:
Cons:
The main appeal of this set to me are the colors. As explained in the video, they are useful for the creation I’m working on. The two main reasons I can think of for buying this set would be for parts or for your kids to play with. In terms of parts, the ones I listed above are interesting and potentially useful, but Bricklink is the better source to get the specific ones you need without buying the entire set. The current price of $29.99 seems a bit high, but Amazon sometimes discount newly released sets by around 20% within the first few months.
There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about the latest model built by Nick Barrett (TechnicNick), the LEGOLand circus. Before there were minifigs, LEGO already made the much larger maxifigs (although nobody called them that at the time). Their upper torsos and heads were specialised parts, but their bodies were brick-built. I had a few of these as a child and my sister had a much larger collection. Nick, who is a few years older than me, has combined these classic figures with modern parts and top-notch build techniques in this fantastic model.
Apparently I’m not alone in liking this, because Nick’s model won the 6th annual MocOlympics contest. Check out the details (and what happens after the fuze on the cannon is lit) on MOCPages.
With a little help from TBB regular Tony Sava, Edward Chang from Texas Brick Railroad LUG has made this adorable microscale layout, complete with Christmas and holiday details, and replicas of children’s favourite trains. One for the kids and adults alike. And if you’re in the Friendswood, TX region you can see this in the brand store in Baybrook Mall.
