Tag Archives: brickleas

This LEGO Ikea showroom might require an allen wrench to recreate.

Iron Builder competitor Brickleas has taken the challenge to the land of Norsemen and ready-to-assemble furniture. This time the seed part has been used to create a chair, some decorative lighting fixtures, and a hood over the stove. But Brickleas didn’t stop at creating a cozy home scene. This build goes the extra mile by zooming out a few feet to reveal that we’re in the showroom of an Ikea. The arrow on the floor guiding shoppers and the black rigging hanging above the fake walls is sure to inspire flashbacks in anyone who has tried to navigate the labyrinthine superstore. “Why do I have to follow these arrows through the whole complex? I’m just trying to buy an affordable shelf for my UCS Batmobile!” Sorry, got a little lost in memories there…

Järnbyggare

A lovely scene at the seashore

When you are feeling stressed out, where do you go to unwind and re-connect with nature? Maybe someplace like this tropical beach by Brickleas, built for an Iron Builder contest using the white radar dish piece, used quite skillfully as steps, a sign, and shades to block the sun on the roof. And in case you missed it, the seagulls as well. One of my favorite features, aside from the shack, is the sand and surf, using slopes and bricks in shades of tan, including dark tan for the sand at the water’s edge.

Iron Bay

The release of a balloon string tugs at our heartstrings

Sometimes it can be easy to forget that LEGO isn’t just a medium for spaceships, dinosaurs, and sports cars. Brickleas reminds us that LEGO can be fine art with this Iron Builder submission inspired by Banksy’s Balloon Girl. The seed part for this match-up was the 3 x 5 deltoid panel, and it has been put to excellent use here as both the balloon and the girl’s dress. The use of varying shades of gray adds an extra feeling of depth to the hills, and there’s an excellent sense of motion in the girl’s windswept hair. The result is a powerful build that evokes a wistfulness in the viewer.

Fading Dreams

The rise and fall of a LEGO castle in four seasons

Given the challenge of building a castle scene depicting the four seasons, most builders would go the traditional route of spring, summer, fall, and winter… there is nothing wrong with that, but these four builders took a very different approach. A collaboration between Brickleas, Simon Hundsbichler, Jonas Kramm, and Ralf Langer. They each choose a season, and built a partial view of a castle, adding a temporal, metaphorical twist to the seasons, depicting birth in the spring, prime in the summer, decline in the fall and death in the winter.

The four Seasons

Keep reading to see more details about each build

Just keep swimming with this LEGO fish creation

This LEGO creation from Brickleas is deceptively simple and colorful, to say the least. The bright colors play off each other beautifully without taking over the scene, and the variety of underwater vegetation is well done, especially with the implied, yet peaceful, movement. This build was a submission for an Iron Builder contest, where the builder had to use this odd shield holder part, and Brickleas did a great job incorporating it into a well-textured fish.

Don't swim with big fishes

Colorful Medieval Market

Yet again, Brickleas draws inspiration from the blue large figure shield holder. This time the result is a lovely medieval market. There are a lot of LEGO parts used in interesting ways in this creation, including many used as decorative woodwork — the wand, bucket handle and the ninja helmet horn elaborate to name a few. Over the years LEGO has released quite a few ‘wooden’ containers. Brickleas uses quite a few of them in their market stalls. We can spot the crate, box, half, small and large barrel and the flowerpot. Their uses aren’t notably creative — they are, after all, containers used as containers — but the diversity helps to create a disheveled atmosphere I associate with markets. The best thing about this creation has to be the depth the picture has due to the framing, thanks to the tunnel/gate walls on the left and right of the picture. The buildings overlap, and the addition of a microscale castle in the background adds further depth. The flooring deserves a quick mention, and you can tell this is a rich city/town thanks to the abundance of goats.

Medieval Market

Asteroids dead ahead! Shields up!

Creative part usage crosses over with retro-gaming nostalgia in Classic Space Arcade by brickleas. This entry into the Iron Builder contest takes uncommon Large Figure Part Shield Holder with Axle LEGO elements and mashes them up with side-scrolling in a way that’s sure to earn a high score. The use of the shield as both a part of the spaceship and the scoring counters is brilliant, but I also like the other creative touches. The smallest white stars are made from headlight bricks with white bars inserted into them, for example. And check out the similar-but-not-identical builds on the asteroids. It looks like classic Atari graphics to me!

Classic Space Arcade

Over the years, we’ve featured a lot of creative builds resulting from Iron Builder challenges. Why not check our archives and see what you’ve missed?

C is for Seed Part. You know, phonetically.

The Iron Builder competition is based around taking an unusual LEGO “seed part” and incorporating in into amazing creations. brickleas is an expert at this craft, taking a huge pile of 100 blue  Large Figure Part Shield Holder with Axle pieces and transforming them into Sesame Street’s own Cookie Monster. The texture of the shield elements does an amazing job of standing in for Cookie’s fur, but the techniques that create the black puppet-mouth and googly eyes are just as impressive. Even that chocolate chip cookie manages to look delicious somehow.

Seed Part Monster

When I reviewed 21324 LEGO Ideas Sesame Street, I had a few reservations about the look of the Cookie Monster minifigure, and it does my heart good to see him done justice here. If you’re a fan of Sesame Street, too, then check out some of our other featured creations starring more Muppet friends!

Sittin’ on the porch, enjoyin’ the view

Just this evening, after we finished our dinners, my kids, wife, and I sat out on our front porch enjoying the warm, sunny weather while eating our popsicles for dessert. It was quite the treat to sit there, watching the world go by, barefoot on a rocking chair. The way I felt while sitting there is the same way I feel looking at this LEGO scene by Elias Hübner. There’s the warm light of the setting sun, the verdant green of the lawn and garden, and reminders of yard work that still needs to be done. Sure, my own garden is not as green as this one, and none of my flowers have bloomed, and I haven’t had to mow yet. But the mood is there. And it is pure summer bliss.

Sunset View

This is Elias’s latest build for the Iron Builder competition. The seed part this round is the obscure “Large Figure Part Shield Holder with Axle” in blue, used in many ways throughout the build, from chair cushions to a birdhouse, as well as lawn mower bits and flowers and exterior lamps. But my favorite use is definitely that watering can. Just perfect!

The last (tiny) homely house east of the sea

Rivendell – the mention of the name already evokes a feeling of home. A location in J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it appears as a sanctuary, a last respite to characters who are on a journey into “the wilderness.” Builder Elias (Brickleas) built the Last Homely House in all its peaceful glory in microscale in just 100 LEGO parts. While the elven buildings are tiny among the large cliffs, they are instantly recognisable thanks to clever parts usage.

Rivendell

I love the way Elias uses books as the angled roofs, and one stickered book is actually very fitting here. It is the Red Book of Westmarch, the book that Bilbo Baggins wrote during his retirement in Rivendell. The battle droid torso also works very well, since its skeletal nature represents the open-air feel of those buildings. I found the small waterfalls very impressive, using Hero Factory claw pieces which perfectly hug the large wedge used as a cliff. Elias perfectly demonstrates that when building something with a small number of parts, use the best parts.

A model model of a model

We all know you can build things out of LEGO, but “building something that you build something out of, out of LEGO” is a sentence that I don’t get to write all that often. Brickleas gave me the chance with this fun diorama of in-progress model building. It makes use of the clip-flag seed part from Iron Forge a whopping 30 times, and finding them all is a fun exercise. My favorites are the bird’s beak, the dab of paint, and the blade in the well-built craft knife.  The rest of the scene has some great details, too. I’m fond of the interesting texture in the hobby mat from the dark green tiles. And the branch the bird is perched on makes use of the minifigure tree disguise. It might be obvious in retrospect, but it feels clever to me.

Model making

This year’s Iron Forge has gifted us with a ton of interesting builds, as our archives show. Go take a look!

Quite some minifigures were harmed in the making of this creation...

Elias tore apart quite a few figures to build this creation and his the use of torso’s in this creation is amazing. They are everywhere! From the columns to the altar, from the platform to the staff. Thirty torsos have been used in this LEGO creation. The thing I love the most is the way the printing on the torsos was incorporated in the build. There are a lot of city hoodies and licenses fantasy torsos used to represent cracks and crumbling down of this ruined temple. What torsos do you recognize? Also a special mention goes out to Elias for using the sprue from the flower stem with 3 large leaves for foliage.

Ruined Temple