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.

I’d like to be under the sea

If you feel a longing for vibrant colors, piece, and quite, try spending a day at Anthony Wilson‘s underwater lab. Built for fundamental marine research, this facility looks like a proper resort: huge windows, glass tunnels, and out-of-this-world species diversity right in front of you. I bet this place was engineered by those escaping anything happening above the water. It took me at least a couple of minutes to spot all the different fish captured in this build. I must admit, now I feel a lot calmer and happier.

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Why does she get a blaster and I don’t?

Watching Star Wars it seems impossible not to sympathize with all the dummy droids. One of the reasons is their straightforwardness; they always speak what they process. Speaking about the Imperial K2SO from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, one of my favorite moments was his genuine question regarding a blaster in Jyn’s hand. Mirko Soppelsa builds a fantastic statuette, but still gives the droid no weapons.

Unlike many other similar works, Mirko’s droid features a very detailed area behind its head. Black, gray, and gold pieces go very well with each other. I totally believe there is the droid’s unique character hiding somewhere behind all those tubes and wires.

Genius inspiration is fleet-ing

Capturing great details on a spaceship that fits in the palm of your hand is a refreshing surprise from TBB Veteran, Letranger Absurde, and this pair of spaceships, while inspired by Star Wars, stand alone as a lesson in master parts usage. Take the fighter, made from a single LEGO minifigure robot head mold from the Galaxy Squad theme, where the facial visor serves as the cockpit canopy. And the red 1×1 tile on the side of the frigate nose picks up the circle design on the sides of the fighter beautifully.

A tasty LEGO build indeed

Ever seen a LEGO build that was just….tasty? Palixa And The Bricks takes us from forest to plate in a culinary journey featuring a somewhat unusual central protein: Wild boar.

Let’s start out with the beast itself in a very very raw state. Charismatic to a fault with Mixel eyes and grey banana ears, this happy-go-lucky scamp has no idea what’s in store. Take a moment and savor the musculature; various curved slopes and tiles gave a good feel of the bulk and weight soon to be enjoyed.

Read on to see this beast turn in to a feast

Fancier than a plate of es-cargo, and twice as tasty

While this sleek LEGO cargo ship by Guy Smiley would look perfectly at home in a scene of interstellar combat, this pair of vessels are here to get the shipping job done. The cargo ship is sporting some powerful engines, and the support craft has a manipulator arm to load and unload the containers. But my favorite part use is the door panels from a Minifig cupboard, used throughout the models, with those two tiny holes.

But every great spaceship needs a worthy stand to support it, and if you look closely at this scene, you will discover that this stand is a creation all its own, depicting an entire microscale city over which these ships are flying on their way to the port.

TBB Weekly Brick Report: LEGO news roundup for February 8, 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 third week of January 2020.

We go behind the scenes with LEGO Masters’ judges, Jamie Berard and Amy Corbett. Keep reading our Brick Report to get all the details.

TBB NEWS, FEATURES AND INSTRUCTIONS: This week we revealed the results of the Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series vote, continued our three part series on LEGO Education and learned how to make our very own LEGO BD-1 droid!

A History of LEGO Education, Part 3: Mindstorms over matter [Feature] – The final installment in our LEGO Education history series covers the game-changing release of LEGO Mindstorms.
The Republic Gunship will be one of the next Ultimate Collector Series LEGO Star Wars sets – The results of the fan vote reveal that over half of those who voted voted for the iconic spaceship from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
Build your own LEGO BD-1 from the video game Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order [Instructions] – With video instructions by hachiroku24, you can re-create the adorable companion droid from the video game Jedi: Fallen Order.
Everything you want to know about LEGO Masters judges Amy Corbett and Jamie Berard [Feature] – LEGO Masters premieres tonight, and we have all the behind-the-scenes info about the show from the judges. Will you be watching?

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:

Camille Walala Designs a Colorful House with LEGO That’s Every Kid’s Fantasy, Design Milk – Artist Camille Walala was invited by LEGO to create a public art installation in London
‘Lego Masters’: How to watch the Fox competition show online without cable, Oregon Live – How to watch LEGO Masters if you’ve cut the cord.
FAQ Concerning The LEGO Group acquisition of Bricklink , Bricklink – Read the official announcements or browse the FAQ
Lego to turn all its bricks ‘green’ by 2030 as company develops sugar cane and wood alternatives to plastic, The Telegraph – Lego is moving away from plastic that is dependent on crude oil

Workhorses fit for a minifigure army

LEGO Minifigures are oddly-proportioned little fellows. Because I am fussy about the scale of my models I rarely use them with my builds. However, thanks to a number of collaborative builds I’ve been involved with, which all involved minifigures, I’ve grown to appreciate them a bit more. Recently I have been steadily building a collection of minifig-scaled military models. These are the latest two: a US Army M936 wrecker truck towing an M1025 “HumVee” armament carrier. There are countless quotes about how logistics are at least as important to fighting a war as tactics. Equipment used in combat may capture people’s imaginations, but modern armies include vast numbers of support vehicles that are true workhorses. To me those are at least as interesting as tanks or artillery.

What constitutes minifig scale can be difficult and LEGO themselves have muddied the waters. When I was growing up, LEGO cars were just four studs wide. About ten years ago, most LEGO city cars were five studs wide and trucks seven studs wide, including their mudguards. With the recent Speed Champions sets the width of a supposedly minifig scaled car has been bumped up to nine studs, again including the mudguards. The cars look cool and seat two figures side-by-side. However, if you pose a figure next to the vehicle, it’s clear we’ve moved firmly into silly territory. I based my scale on the figure’s height. The wrecker truck ended up being seven studs wide. The HumVee is only six studs wide, which is much smaller than most minifig scale HumVees that are out there. Despite this small scale, both vehicles still have enough space inside for a driver.

This wind-up toy robot is programmed to love you all very much

If you like retro wind-up toy robots then set your phasers to Positively Delighted. It turns out Lino Martins (hey, that’s me!) has built one out of LEGO and the result is…pretty OK. It would probably be weird to label my own work as totally awesome, stupendous or earth-shattering so I’ll just go with pretty OK. He’s adorned in fabulously fifties black and sea-foam green with gray and just a touch of flashy silver. Through a series of gears, his chest plates open simultaneously and when you turn his wind-up key his head, heart and arms will rotate. Yes, he has a heart! I think it takes eight or ten or so rotations of the wind-up key to get his head, heart and arms to all settle back into their rightful positions. If I were a real engineer I’d know that for sure but… What am I, Elon Musk?

Check out this video of the wind-up action. This cheery bot is programmed to love you all very much. I’m programmed to be rather indifferent on the matter but I can create a swell playlist for any occasion so there’s that.

A rural office location for a different kind of paperwork

Brick or human, when you need to go, you need to go. We humans have a place to go around every corner (the less hygienic take “every corner” a bit too literally though), but the plastic brick people have a much harder time to find an outhouse. Or at least they would, if SuckMyBrick had not built this outstanding LEGO outhouse.

The build is visually simple, well photographed and composed. The ramshackle style is captured perfectly with tiles pointing in angles just odd enough to not be 90 degrees and the front door uses a few closely related colours to give a fading impression – but according to the builder, the creation is not as fragile as it looks. The base completes the build with details like fragrant flowers in the back and curved slopes that really add to the cartoony style.

I think I finally get Radiohead

LEGO builders Timofey Tkachev and Sheo have put together a tragic band that somehow has nothing to do with Radiohead or Joy Division. That is a total bummer because I really wanted to lay on the references for either band pretty thick but that’ll have to wait for another post now. Instead the members of this sad band are rooted with a much more highbrow notion; each bears the name of great Greek tragedians.

Click to delve deeper, you know you want to!

Does this robot look a little boxy to you?

A key concept of the Transformers line is for things to be “more than meets the eye.” Builder Moko has made something that really fits the brief. This LEGO storage crate is actually a fierce fighting robot.

First, let’s examine that outer shell. The decorations on the face of the cube are from printed 2×2 wedge tiles, a code tile from an EXO-FORCE set, and a number 7 tile from a 1991 Technic 8838 Shock Cycle set. Beyond that, it’s…just a box. I can easily imagine this being part of the background in some massive LEGO hanger diorama and never giving it a second thought. That’s some impressive camouflage.

But, with a few twists and turns (detailed in Moko’s blog post), this cube unfolds into a really cool robot. The necessary joints to cram the robot into a cube has the side effect of giving it a high level of articulation. It doesn’t feel like there was an inch of wasted space in this build. It may be a simple thing, but I also really like the choice of a transparent light-blue tile for the eyes. The color choices here really pop.

So the next time you see a bunch of boxes sort of shoved off to the side of a display, look again. You might just be in for a heck of a surprise.

Mobile Suit Gumball

You ever have one of those days when you mention something in idle conversation, and suddenly every site you visit online is advertising a related product to you? I have, and it’s downright creepy. But you just know retailers are looking for even more invasive ways of getting their products in front of you. And, unfortunately, I think we may be getting a glimpse of that future right here. Taking inspiration from pixel artist Kenze Wee’s Cyberpunk vending machines, LEGO builder lokiloki29 has created a futuristic drone that combines convenience with an unsettling feeling of “buy or die”.

Built at miniland scale, this creation looks completely plausible. The variety of products on display do look tempting, and Ninjago-sourced logos are right in line with the aesthetic. Cheery red domes and curves create the impression of a friendly gumball machine. My favorite detail, though, is minifig hammers as feet. Those dainty pads makes this whole thing seem cuter somehow. Maybe I will get myself a little treat from this scuttling nightmare that followed me home.

…and that’s how they get you, I guess.