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.

Will anyone trade me two bricks for one sheep?

I’m trying to build the longest road here, folks. I need those bricks. Anyone who has ever played the board game The Settlers of Catan will instantly relate to this build by Cab ~, with the hexagonal board tiles and the wooden game pieces. This one is built in three dimensions, however, and with LEGO bricks. Impressively, the whole scene is LEGO, including the cards in the background, the table, and the dice. I happen to love mosaics, and the work that went into those cards is well worth it. I also love Catan, so this build has me wanting to have a game night. The only problem is the social distancing. Maybe if we all sit six feet apart it will work…

It’s also an entry to the Iron Forge, the open-to-all-comers entry competition to the famous Iron Builder, so you can see lots of minifigure legs in the build. They give the hexagons their distinctive shape. I also love the clips for the sheep’s grass and the grille tiles for wheat. Now if only I had built my settlement on the bricks.

The Brothers Brick is funded by our readers and the community. Articles may include affiliate links, and when you purchase products from those links, TBB may earn a commission that helps support the site.

She called me a steed

Contests bring out a different side in builders. I cut my teeth in the LEGO world making fantasy-based castles and the like over in the Guilds of Historica on Eurobricks, but for contests I have been building out of my comfort zone. First there was some Star Wars builds last May, then more recently a Neo-Classic spaceship, a pirate ship, a butterfly, and a bird. They’re quite different from what I got used to building, and they required different approaches. Most recently, I (Benjamin Stenlund) built an American Mustang, and no, I’m not talking about the muscle car, but about the horse that roams some parts of the Western USA. Though maybe I’ll build some cars soon, too, just for kicks.

Building him (and he is a male, if you look closely, a stud stallion) required patience in shaping like grey castle walls don’t. A plate or two of difference in the legs, the angle of the head, the girth of the chest, all these things required fine tuning and frequent adjustments. I built the head first, because if you start with the body, scaling the head to it becomes a nightmare (or is it a night stallion?), but even so I had to redesign the body multiple times. And pulling apart reddish brown pieces is a harrowing experience, never knowing when one could snap. And then supporting the weight of the whole horse with the tail required some Technic structure; I admit I fudged it a bit, and things did not quite line up, but it’s a custom creation and not an official set, so who cares? It was built for the studless category of the Style it Up contest (hence I made a stud) but I threw in some gratuitous minifigure-leg cacti to enter it into the Iron Forge, too. Now hopefully I can go back to building castles for a while…

Quiet solitude

Sometimes it’s all about getting the right camera angle… And maybe some fantastic vaulted ceilings. This monochrome shrine, built by David Hensel, is an exceptional marriage of LEGO architecture and photography. The lighting gives the whole scene a sense of somber and noble peacefulness. And the way that the pieces mesh together provides an element of age. It’s bold yet austere. If you have never tried to build curves like this, take a crack at it. This style requires a patient hand!

David recently made another completely different monochrome build. This time photography comes into play in a different way. Also take a look at some of these other awesome monochrome creations in our archives.

LEGO Minions sets now available including brick-built Stuart, Kevin and Bob [News]

Two new LEGO sets based on the upcoming animated film Minions: Rise of Gru are now available from the LEGO Store online. The sets include brick-built minions and their lairs (w/ 2x VIP points for May) as well as a motorbike with Gru and various Minions minifigures. LEGO had originally planned on releasing five Minions-themed sets, though it has postponed launching three of them more closely based on the movie which was delayed until next year due to COVID-19.

You can see all five Minions sets from our live coverage of Toy Fair New York, or take a look at all the other new LEGO sets launched in the month of April. More LEGO Minions set photos, piece counts and prices are included after the jump.

Click to see all the new LEGO Minions sets available today

In a house in a tree lived a hobbit

Not all hobbits lived in snug little tunnels under the rolling hills of the Shire. Some of them made their homes in the trees. These adventurous souls were probably Brandybucks or Tooks mind you, and the sensible folks around Hobbiton always suspected they were a little odd in the head. This fantastical LEGO treehouse home built by Mountain Hobbit is a cracker. The tree itself is wonderful, all gnarled and ancient with some serious root action going on, and the house set into the trunk is an interesting selection of angles. But it’s the little details which make this model pop — the vines wrapping around the tree’s branches, the window and the lantern, the hanging bunting, and the little basket of possessions. Lovely stuff.

LEGO and Universal Music Group to create music-based toys [News]

LEGO and Universal Music Group (UMG) have announced a partnership to create a new lineup of music-based sets that seek to inspire children to express themselves musically and explore their creativity through interactivity. The music sets will be revealed later this year and are scheduled for launch in 2021.

Universal Music Group is separate from Universal Pictures which announced a five-year agreement to produce and distribute LEGO movies earlier this week. We also don’t know if the recent LEGO Ideas “Music to Our Ears” competition is at all related to this announcement, though LEGO is evaluating bringing some of the submissions to market as sets.

The full press release and a LEGO music equalizer announcement video are included after the jump.

Click to see the press release and announcement video.

Here’s the skinny on this barber shop

Some people shave their heads and then shed a tear while gazing in the mirror because the option of having cool Johnny Depp hair has long since expired. Allegedly. Shut up, don’t judge. Other people, like Maxim Baybakov have better experiences with haircuts and visit the same barbershop for twenty years. He liked his local barbershop so much he has recreated it in LEGO. He tells us the balcony still haunts him to this day. Why? He doesn’t provide the answer but I can only presume it was an incident that involved a freshly coiffed haircut and someone dumping hot oil or a pot of soup or something. No matter why the balcony haunts him, admittedly, the build techniques are pretty stellar. The inset tan storefront, the roof, and the round window are also quite charming.

It’s not quite instructions, but this shot offers sort of an exploded view that illustrates some of the more clever techniques for this build. With a little time and patience, this balcony can haunt you as well.

LEGO Star Wars helmets: 75274 TIE Pilot, 75276 Stormtrooper, & 75277 Boba Fett [Review]

Twenty-one years and around 700 sets after its inception, the LEGO Star Wars theme has done something new. It has introduced LEGO sets with an age rating of 18+. No, they’re not risque models of Princess Leia, merely display models clearly targeting adult collectors who want display items for their mantle. Few LEGO themes have embraced adult collectors the way the Star Wars line has. With the multi-generational, massive fanbase for Star Wars, this isn’t surprising, since now more than 40 years after the original film there are certainly more Star Wars fans over the age of 18 than under it. And this focus on adult fans isn’t new. Back in 2001, LEGO introduced the Ultimate Collector Series, kicking off not just with an X-wing and TIE Interceptor, but also an 1800-piece bust of Darth Maul. Now LEGO has introduced a trio of new mantle decorations in the form of three iconic helmets from the Star Wars universe:
75274 TIE Pilot Helmet | 724 pcs | US $59.99 | CAN $79.99 | UK £54.99
75276 Stormtrooper Helmet | 647 pcs | US $59.99 | CAN $79.99 | UK £54.99
75277 Boba Fett Helmet | 625 | US $59.99 | CAN $79.99 | UK £54.99

All three of the Star Wars helmets are available now, and run for the same price with around 600-700 pieces. So what makes these new sets worthy of an 18+ rating? Spoiler alert: nothing. However, that aside, let’s see how the sets stack up.

Click to read the full review

It ain’t much but it’s a couple of tractors

Designing scaled farming machinery is, in equal measure, fun and challenge. It’s all about sketching a neat chassis, adding just the right amount of grills and pipes to the engine’s exterior, and, of course, building a piece of farming equipment to attache to a tractor. Vladimir Drozd nailed all of these in his splendid designs. It is their clean yet very realistic exteriors that instantly caught my eye. With just a handful of curved slopes, Vladimir managed to create simple models without overloading them with way too complicated building solutions.

It’s so easy to spoil a great creation with an unsuitable exterior element, but I applaud the author’s decision to complete the red tractor with a couple of road signs.

If you can dream it, you can build it

I’m a die-hard Disney fan. Walt is one of my creative heroes — a constant source of inspiration — and the theme parks at DisneyWorld are some of my favourite places. The current lockdown situation has seen us have to cancel a family trip to Florida, and whilst there are obviously much more serious problems in the world than a missed holiday, I’ve been feeling a bit down about it. I decided to cheer myself up by attempting to recreate some Disney magic with LEGO bricks. Three years ago, I enjoyed putting together a microscale LEGO version of Cinderella’s Castle, so I decided to set myself the challenge of creating some other iconic theme park sights. In addition to a rebuild of the Magic Kingdom’s centrepiece castle, I took a crack at Spaceship Earth at Epcot, and the Chinese Theatre at Hollywood Studios. We’ll see where my microscale tour of central Florida takes me next, but I feel Animal Kingdom and Typhoon Lagoon beckoning…

Millennium Falcon concept smuggles its way into our hearts

Based off of Star Wars: The Art of Solo Andrew Miller’s slick Millenium Falcon variant zooms straight out of hyperspace and into LEGO. I have to admit I’m a huge sucker for concept art, and I hold a special affinity for any bit of Star Wars-that-could-have-been.

This black-and-grey version has very few similarities to the white-and-blue edition we got in Solo: A Star Wars Story (and as the Kessel Run Falcon LEGO set.) The small black winglets on either side of the hull are interesting, and I especially like the souped up engine cowling and much longer prow. The builder even worked in an removable escape pod not unlike what we got in the movie. I suppose explaining how this Falcon became the piece of junk we all originally met in A New Hope would have been just a tad more difficult.

Check out the art this is based on:

TBB Weekly Brick Report: LEGO news roundup for April 25, 2020

In addition to the amazing LEGO models created by builders all over the world, The Brothers Brick brings you the best of LEGO news and reviews. This is our weekly Brick Report for the fourth week of April 2020.

We’ve got the info on all the upcoming summer LEGO Creator sets! Keep reading our Brick Report to get all the details.

TBB NEWS, FEATURES AND REVIEWS: This week we saw Universal and LEGO tie the knot (movie wise), learned about an update to the Powered-Up system, revealed the May 4th LEGO Star Wars Gift with Purchase and got touchy-feely with the new Collectable Minifigure set!

LEGO Collectible Minifigures 71027 Series 20 Feel Guide [Review] – Collectible Minifigures Series 20 is available now! Want to split a case with friends? We’ve got just the thing for you with this handy Feel Guide.
LEGO and Universal Pictures strike deal for new LEGO movies – LEGO and Universal Pictures will be making more LEGO Movies for the next 5 years, in a new deal that opens the way for movies based on both existing and new franchises.
It takes all sorts of sorts: LEGO organization and me, Chris Doyle [Feature] – Brothers Brick contributor Chris Doyle (@Whatevscj) takes us through his workspace and sorting strategy.
LEGO Powered Up update to the community – LEGO shares with the community a message on the Powered Up system and how they’ve been listening to the feedback.
LEGO Star Wars gift with purchase for May the Fourth revealed as 40407 Death Star II Battle – This exclusive LEGO Star Wars Death Star II Battle set will be available from LEGO May 1-4.
LEGO Creator Summer 2020 wave features a pirate ship, space rover and camper van – LEGO Pirates are making another comeback in these new Creator 3-in-1 sets coming this summer.

OTHER NEWS: There were quite a few other interesting LEGO news articles from around the web this week. Here are the best of the rest:

Huge 3D-printed LEGO go-kart makes you the minifig, Hackaday – The LEGO Technic line is definitely the hacker’s flavor of LEGO.
NASA and Lego Host ‘Build a Planet’ Challenge, Smithsonian – The event was part of the company’s week of #LetsBuildTogether challenges
Some Good News (SGN) by John Krasinski, YouTube – Episode 4 starts off with a low-tech stop-motion LEGO opening.