This is an amazingly cool recreation of a Rembrandt painting, by Barbara Werth (found by Bruce).
Here’s the original, just to show how nicely Barbara captured the painting’s composition, lighting, and overall mood:
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg It | Furl It
After spending an incredible weekend at NWBrickCon this last weekend, I finally got my journal online.
You can read it here.
It was a ton of fun to see all the creations and meet so many Lego fans. Of course, the highlight of the weekend was finally getting to meet Andrew in real life. As I looked through my pics of the public hours, I had a bunch of Andrew so I give you the Dunechaser Montage!
With his roaming Aztec gods:
Pointing out the finer details of Castle building:
Posing with his Serenity crew:
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg It | Furl It
Have you ever wondered what an X-ray of LEGO would look like? Neither have I, which is why Brickshelfer Menoriel’s new gallery of ghostly images is so fascinating. Here’s what Obi-Wan and Darth look like under those crazy invisible rays (click for more):
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg It | Furl It
A man named Ole Kirk Christiansen made hand-crafted wooden toys in a sleepy Danish village called Billund.
Naming his company “LEGO” (from the Danish words “Leg godt” — play well), his company made pigs:
And roosters, and rabbits:
Some of the wooden toys also included bits of plastic, a sign of things to come:
Ole and his company made wooden toys until 1960:
Today, the LEGO Company is better known for the interlocking plastic bricks they began producing in 1949. LEGO elements as we know them today were introduced in 1958, when brick design was changed to include a stud-and-tube “coupling system.” With additional innovations along the way, like the minifig in 1978, LEGO toys are far-removed from their predecessors. But toys are toys, and fun is fun. I wonder what LEGO toys will look like fifty years from now?
(This walk down memory lane was brought to you by Swisso’s fantastic collection of vintage wooden LEGO toys, and by the BrickWiki article on the LEGO Company. Oh, and by the letter Q and the imaginary number e.)
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg It | Furl It
More Beatles album art from Digger Digger Dogstar. Need I say more? I think not.
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg It | Furl It
Flickrite Digger Digger Dogstar has fantastic Photoshop skills, as he demonstrates by incorporating minifigs into Beatles album art.
His latest is With the Beatles:
Since I haven’t blogged them before, here’s Abbey Road:
…and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band:
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg It | Furl It
For the record, I don’t endorse vandalism, but some of these are really rather cool:
From Flickr user yorkshire4 | From Flickr user gfrancis
From Flickr user mmmazzoni
From Flickr user darnolds
From Flickr user loveandunrest
From Flickr user rojotelefono | From Flickr user cherrybiz
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg It | Furl It
Annie Preston rounds out her series of vignettes with three more 20th-century artists (via Vignette Bricks):
Mark Rothko:
Andy Warhol:
Jasper Johns:
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg It | Furl It
Brickshelfer Annie Preston has been posting art-inspired vignettes over the last week or so (via VignetteBricks):
Piet Mondrian:
Pablo Picasso:
Jackson Pollock:
This builder, appropriately named Smurf, has built a cool Smurf bust:
Definitely a cool smurf, but an interesting point of this creation is that its made almost entirely out of bricks. There are a few plates involved, but by an large its all bricks. Overall, a great job achieving “roundness” with only bricks. Smurfy!
Here’s the gallery
Douglas Coupland, author of books such as Generation X and Microserfs is apparently a LEGO fan. I noticed that several of his books have covers that incorporate LEGO into the design:
A quick search for Douglas Coupland LEGO turned up this article. Here’s Coupland talking about LEGO:
Thing is, we all played with Lego…. There just comes a time when you don’t go into that box anymore, and then for the next 30 years Lego’s been playing with me. Messing with my mind and my way of looking at things. I’ve [been wondering] all this time, where do I end and toys begin?
Apparently, though, Coupland’s dark age is over. The article describes an art installation he’s created (sorry, no pictures), in which he uses LEGO. I really like this next quote:
I had to build the Cape Cod house with two dormer windows, and my God! My fingers still had that weird Lego tingling feeling. I was still hunting down in the bottom of the box for that one piece. That sound? You remember that sound? Of stirring around in the bottom of a box of Lego? When I’m building things in my mind, I call it ‘shapehead.’ When I’ve got shapehead, I can’t sleep, I might as well just keep on building and building…
Nice. I guess that makes me a shapehead.