Tag Archives: Characters

We love builds with character! Creating characters from LEGO elements, whether traditional System bricks or using elements from Bionicle and Constraction themes, is an amazing way to showcase your building skills. Brining out emotion and personality in bricks is an art!

Super-cute super brothers superbly put together

Whilst we’ve never had an official set, Mario and Luigi are no strangers to LEGO. Many builders have tackled these gaming icons before, but it’s always good to see another take. These figures by ZiO Chao are excellent — tightly-built in a chibi style, but immediately recognisable, and full of character. The outfits are perfectly captured, the faces expressive, and I love the stands beneath each figure. Don’t miss the brickwork on Toad’s mushroom head, and the simple but effective way ZiO has captured Toad’s face. Lovely stuff.

LEGO Mario Luigi Toad

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This Fred Flintstone portrait is a Yabba-Dabba-Doozie!

Builder SuckMyBrick is perhaps best known for his pop culture LEGO models, but he has reached a new level with this spot-on portrait of Fred Flintstone. The Flintstones premiered in 1960 as the first ever prime time animated series. Almost 50 years later, Fred, Wilma, Barney and Betty are still a part of our pop culture landscape, so much so that The LEGO Group produced the Flintstone’s iconic house as LEGO Ideas Set 21316 back in March.

Fred Flintstone

When building with LEGO, it can be quite difficult to achieve the lines and curves required to make a portrait, and there is often a certain amount of abstraction that needs to take place. SuckMyBrick does an astounding job here with his utilization of the 3rd dimension, angles and curves. He also makes great use of studs up, studs out and even sideways building to achieve this look. I am particularly impressed by the builder’s ability to create this very sleek style with no studs showing. From a distance you might not even know this was made with LEGO bricks. The third dimension is expertly used to not only create Fred’s facial features, but to also give the impression that his is reaching out of the edge of the frame. It’s a positively perfect portrait of the patriarch of everyone’s favorite modern stone-age family!

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GLaDos is doing science and she’s still alive

GLaDos is back and she’s serving up some vengeance on Chell and Wheatley in this Portal vignette by hachiroku24. Way back in 2007, the video game industry was taken by storm by Portal, a mind-bending game that pitted a human test subject against technology run amok. A sequel followed in 2011 and the series proved popular enough that LEGO included it as a playable world in LEGO Dimensions, even producing an official Chell minifigure and the beloved Weighted Companion Cube. Hachiroku24 has taken that Chell minifig and built this spot-on recreation of a scene with the evil GLaDos and Portal 2’s friendly AI, Wheatley.

Lego Portal 2 GLaDOS vs Chell and Wheatley

GLaDos is perfectly rendered here utilizing a variety of visible Technic parts to create that feeling of exposed machine technology. The hoses and wires are especially effective and add a touch of realism that make the whole machine seem plausible. I’m very fond of the combination of pieces used to create GLaDos’ elegantly curved “face”. Comical sidekick Wheatley, in contrast to his larger relative, gets a similarly ideal treatment but using only a small number of parts. As a builder, I like “breaking the square” so I really love the use of hinges and angled plates to create a more irregular shaped base for this scene. Although 12 years may have passed, thanks to hachiroku24, GLaDos is still getting the science done for the people who are still alive.

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This LEGO Freddie Mercury is the perfect epitome and embodiment of a legend

If they can build a Freddie Mercury like that, there’s little doubt AlexParkDesigns is a fan of Queen. Although the model is simple at first glance, there’s so much to admire about the parts usage to be impressed with. Let’s start with the inverted rubber tires which seamlessly join the torso armour from buildable figures. For a split second, I thought I was looking at a Technic tooth bar, but the lapels on the jacket are brick built with 1×2 slopes on a 1×6 plate. Who says you can’t live forever? Well, at least you can be immortalised in LEGO bricks with this perfect pose.

Freddie Mercury

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Freddy in LEGO form, as TBB’s own Iain Heath brought us an excellent larger-scale LEGO Freddy Mercury figure back in 2011.

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Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world

Miro Dudas takes us on a surfin’ safari with a lovely figural model. After working with this surfer girl since 2015, Dudas has finally achieved the look he wants, proving that even smaller models can benefit from extensive tinkering.

Vintage Hawaiian Surfing

This California girl has a wonderfully fluid pose and the limited color palette consisting of only six colors really highlights the elegant figure. It also contains some fantastic parts usage such as the minifig bandanas for the bikini top and the Battle Droid torsos as shoulders. Her windswept hairdo also features a ninja helmet horn standing in for bangs and brown carrot tops that add some nice additional detail to the coiffure. I’m also very fond of the overall smooth look achieved by showing very few studs.

Dudas says he will soon be offering instructions for this beauty so you too can ride the waves all the way to Surf City.

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Deep in the Hundred Acre Wood where Christopher Robin builds

“Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs…” Well, not in this case. Here we get Winnie The Pooh and Tigger, created in LEGO bricks by BrickinNick. These renditions of the Disney versions of A. A. Milne’s classic characters are immediately recognisable and great fun. Pooh looks a little less rotund than usual, but he’s probably about to sort that out by guzzling an entire pot of honey. The model manages to catch Tigger mid-bounce, which is no mean feat. There’s a real sense of energy and movement in the pose, and Tigger’s colour scheme and facial expression are spot-on.

The wonderful thing about Tiggers

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She bricked my heart and left me for another...

I met Javier Soravilla at Japan Brickfest in Kobe a couple of weeks ago, and I swore to him that if he ever looked the other way even for a minute, I’d steal his Queen of Hearts away from him. This lovely character was one of my favourite builds on the floor. It looks so perfect with that solemn pose, graceful stance, and beautifully shaped back bow down to the rubber belts for the sandals.

I’m also heartbroken to say that though I did make a proposal, she did find her way back to Javier in the end.

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.

Devilman fights evil with even more evil

How many of you have had that dream where you’re a muscular and shirtless demon-lord clad in black leather pants and sitting atop a throne of skulls of all the souls you have vanquished? You know….the one where you’re in a hellish, burning landscape and the sky rains kerosene while Motorhead or Mastodon blares at ear-splitting volume from some unknown source. Wait, none of you? Wow, you people are weird! That is like my most recurring dream, besides the one where I’m taking final exams only to find that everyone else is naked except me. I’m sure Cid Hsiao likely knows what I’m talking about as evidenced by this recent creation.

lego_devilman1

Devilman is a Japanese manga series, first written and illustrated by Go Nagai in 1972. The dark storyline made it stand apart from other manga of the time. Here we see Akira/Devilman stepping on the skull of a three-eyed hell-beast. There are multiple horns and sets of bat wings adorning this model but the most impressive by far are the dark red folding dragon wings found only in the Hobbit LEGO set 79018 The Lonely Mountain. While Cid’s days may or may not be fueled by heavy metal music, you should check out the rest of his creations as they are still worthy of my darkest and weirdest dreams.

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.

Father Brown is here to solve any mystery

G. K. Chesterton was a prolific English man of letters from the early 20th century, writing countless articles, editorials, letters, non-fiction books, short stories, novels, and even epic poems. One of his most beloved and recognizable characters is the crime-solving priest, Father Brown. Father Brown could rival the more famous Sherlock Holmes in his ability to unravel any mystery by using his powers of observation and deduction. Brought to life in LEGO form by prolific Finnish man of bricks Eero Okkonen, this Father Brown is modeled after the character as played by Mark Williams on the BBC show. The eyes are hidden behind round glasses, and the shoulders are slightly hunched over. The black cassock, the clerical garb worn by the priest in his exploits, is well done, even including a slight bulge for the rounded belly that the unassuming Father Brown had acquired over the years.

Father Brown

A round wheel well in white makes for a lovely clerical collar, and a tire holds on the hat, allowing for a more natural angle. A Technic connector allows a subtle curve for the chin. The studs on the cassock were inevitable, as covering them would have ruined the otherwise flowing lines of the fabric, and they don’t detract from the final appearance. To distinguish between the studs and the buttons, 1×1 round tiles have been used. The base adds a nice touch, with a small splash of color against all the black, with the vaguely gothic architecture recalling the English countryside where the priest did most of his sleuthing. My favorite detail, however, is the umbrella that the crime-solving cleric carried everywhere he went.

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.

Daisy and Donald Duck are built and dressed to impress

Disney’s Donald Duck recently celebrated his 85th birthday, and his companion Daisy is technically 82 (she was originally introduced in 1937 as Donna Duck). Koen Zwanenburg is just in time for the party with fantastic looking LEGO versions of the beloved pair. Thanks to a variety of curved and angled elements used, the sculpting of each character’s body looks spot-on. Their eyes are particularly expressive and well angled, especially Daisy’s partially closed eyelids. Meanwhile, Bionicle ball and socket joints used as legs look to be just the right size. Donald looks especially happy, with Daisy giving him a birthday kiss.

Donald & Daisy

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This Jem concert is truly, truly, truly outrageous!

You can feel the Synergy emanating from this bright and cheerful Jem set by Samuel Hatmaker. You may remember him as the creator of the popular Golden Girls project on LEGO Ideas (It reached 10,000 supporters but failed to pass the review). This time, he has built a complete playset that includes four separate pieces capturing all the glamour, glitter, fashion and fame of the 80’s hit cartoon, Jem & the Holograms.

Jem is truly outrageous!

Read more about this truly awesome concert

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.

TBB cover photo for June 2019: The Old Man and the Sea

For this month’s TBB’s social media cover image, summer is in full swing as we head to the beach with vir-a-cocha‘s excellent re-imagining of the Old Man and the Sea. After all, there’s nothing like a good day at the beach with a surfboard and a classic car. From the old man’s Hawaiian shirt to the sweet lines of the 1970 Dodge Challenger (which looks as if it would fit perfectly beside the official LEGO Ford Mustang), there’s a lot to love in this seemingly simple scene of summer.

The Old Man and the Sea

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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.