Tag Archives: Classic Creation

The Meeting produces results

This month, several Neo Classic Space fans got together at Peter Reid’s house in the UK and called it The Meeting. They individually and collectively produced some great stuff, my personal favorite is the LL0505 Comet, a collaborative effort by Thomas Oechsner, Peter Reid and Stuart Crawshaw.

NCS Comet

Worth checking out the other photos of The Meeting for more detailed pictures of this creation as well as several others.

Inside the Mind of a Builder: Bryan (aka Gumby) [Interview]

LEGO Giant Crusader Fig Horse

Although he actually completed it last year, Bryan recently announced the completion of a project that he had been working on for quite some time, namely his Classic Crusader Giant Fig and Horse. I thought this would be a good opportunity to pick his brain and share with our readers some of the “behind-the-scenes” information on this creation.

TBB: How long have you been working on your knight and horse?

Bryan: I probably started on the knight and horse back in June of 2006, completing the knight a month later in July. I really dragged out the construction of the horse and finished it in March of 2008 just before the birth of my son. If you add up all the time I actually worked on them, it probably comes out to 3 weeks worth of evenings, for roughly 40 hours?

LEGO Giant Crusader Fig Horse

TBB: People always ask how many bricks are in a MOC like this. Do you have any idea and do you care?

Bryan: I have no idea. Maybe 5000 bricks for the horse and 3500 for the knight? It doesn’t concern me much since there aren’t very many extremely rare pieces in this MOC apart from all that old dark grey.

TBB: Why did you choose to build a Crusader?

Bryan: Although my first castle set was the yellow castle, my favorite castle set was 6080. I went into my dark ages right before the Crusaders sets came out, and after I rediscovered LEGO back in 1997, I realized that the armor piece was so cool. So I’d say Lion Knights and the Crusaders are now my all-time favorite faction.

LEGO Giant Crusader Fig Horse

TBB: I’ve seen other figs in the this scale but I can’t remember ever seeing the armor before. Are you the first to do that?

Bryan: Yes, I think I’m the first person to have such a large rendition of the breastplate armor with leg protection in ABS plastic.

TBB: What was the most difficult aspect of this MOC?

Bryan: The most difficult part of this MOC was the grill on his helmet. The helmet itself is based heavily on the green hat from the official 3723 LEGO mini-figure set, but I had to design the grill by trial and error. What made it especially challenging is the fact that the helmet is 16 studs wide, but the grill is 17, so I had to use a combination of 1×1 tiles and 1×2 plates with 1 stud to make it work. I remember first building flimsy mockups of the grill, and after I had a design I was satisfied with, I had to make a copy of it with structurally sound building techniques (i.e. “overlap technique”). Finally, I built the helmet around the grill.

TBB: Who or what inspired you as you worked on this?

Bryan: Bruce N H from Classic-Castle first brought my attention to a giant Black Falcon minifig on a horse back in January of 2006. Seeing a giant castle-themed fig was cool, but seeing one on horseback really put it over the top: I had to have one of my own.

TBB: I saw that you have acknowledged or thanked several people in your post. Can you elaborate on how they helped you out?

Bryan: Of course there’s Tobias Reichling, who inspired me to build this. He took numerous pictures of his horse for me and they were extremely useful when building the head section. I also got a lot of help from Peer Kreuger, who came up with a method of creating blueprints for mosaics in Photoshop. He provided me with the building plans for the shield, and I would have never been able to pull off the “rampant lion” if it weren’t for Peer. Finally, I also need to thank Jojo for getting me in touch with Tobias.

LEGO Giant Crusader Fig Horse

TBB: If you were to start over, what would you do differently?

Bryan: Now that I think about it, I should have built a helmet with pointed visor instead. I just realized that there exists no minifig with this color helmet and armor combo…

TBB: What do people say when they see this in your house?

Bryan: Not many people have actually seen this – those that have are generally impressed with it, especially the shield. My parents commented “You still have time for LEGO?” and I had to remind them that this was before I became a dad.

TBB: Are you going to keep it together?

Bryan: I’m a huge fan of LEGO sculptures, so I’m definitely going to keep this together.

TBB: What’s next on the horizon for you, Lego-wise?

Bryan: I’ve built “large” castles as a kid/teenager, but now as an adult, with a much larger collection, I’d like to build a large, detailed castle of course. However, with a 15-month old son running around, that’s not going to happen any time soon, so I’ll settle for something much simpler. I’ll try and find some time to put together my copy of 10193 Medieval Market Village, and hopefully learn some new building techniques in the process.

LEGO Giant Crusader Fig Horse

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us, Bryan!

More ’80s flashbacks

1985 CatalogA few weeks ago I spent a few great hours with friends just poring over old catalogs from the early 1980s through late 1990s. I especially treasured the 1985 catalog (right, US edition) and kept a copy that my friend could spare. That was probably the first year that I was old enough to start building up my own Black Falcon army to challenge my brother’s cowardly lions. This last Saturday, one of the most prized items in our LEGO user group’s gift exchange was a stack of Idea Books from the last 30 years.

So I was absolutely ecstatic to see that Robert VH (flickr and MOCpages) had built The Spearhead, a spaceship that appeared in the 1986 LEGO comic story “Jim Spaceborn.”

Robert VH Spearhead

During my “dark ages,” I did a pretty good job of preserving most of my bricks and instructions, but I regrettably let the catalogs and idea books go. Luckily, I have friends who have plenty of extras. Reliving those memories and garnering inspiration from those classic documents can be a refreshing addition to building.

The Chief proposes...Katie accepts

Ryan Wood proposed via this giant LEGO ring. Pretty cool idea, if you ask me. This happened back in 2006, but Ryan just posted new and improved pics.

LEGO Wedding Engagement Ring

His lovely wife, Katie, built this cool mosaic of their wedding.

LEGO Mosaic Wedding

She displayed it at BrickCon 2007, but I don’t think we ever blogged it.

The more things change . . .

. . . the more they stay the same.

Mike Stimpson’s (balakov) interpretation of the classic photo by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press seems quite timely to feature today though he made it some time ago. Twenty years after Tiananmen Square and my understanding is that due to the press blackout on this image in mainland China, it has not been seen by over a billion people in the People’s Republic.

LEGO Tiananmen Tank Man

I very briefly considered posting this as only an image with link to Mike’s original posting on flickr (for graphic punch), but I found that at least 3 flickr users had swiped the image without giving proper credit and I didn’t want to add to that number. It became my introduction to the brick-busters group on flickr. Sad.

Polar Express by Sava

This is one of Tony Sava‘s older builds, but its a darn good one. We hadn’t featured it before and he just took a new, improved picture of it. So take a ride on the Polar Express!

By the way, Tony is featured in the newest issue of Railbricks. I believe this is their first-ever Steam edition…

Cozy winter kimono

Moko’s latest hair technique gives me an excuse to post his beautiful girl in a kimono (something we haven’t featured before):

Via The Living Brick, Ochre Jelly’s new LEGO sculpture blog.

Glutton by Huxhold

This is a rather old one, by Kevin Huxhold. I’ve never seen it before so I’m blogging it! Why? Because I can! And it’s really cool….

The Enola Gray by Rubin

Dan Rubin has reposted pics of one of his old builds and it’s worth showing off…especially since we’d neglected to post it before. The bulky, yet sleek, lines make this craft pop.

“Turkey” Tactical Response and Combat Enforcer by Adrian Drake

Our focus here on The Brothers Brick is new creations (unless we’re fooled on Brickshelf, as we sometimes are). Nevertheless, classic creations come to our attention now and then that predate the blog and absolutely deserve broader attention.

Adrian Drake (Brickfrenzy) has been posting pictures of older creations on Flickr lately, and my favorite so far is his turkey mecha:

Click the picture for Adrian’s history of this creation, and check out the gallery on brickfrenzy.com for more pictures, including shots of the turkey with all weapons deployed.

Oh, and a belated “Happy Thanksgiving!” from me, too. ;-)

I never thought I’d see the day...

…but someone actually used Galidor pieces and used them well. Steve Puckett pulled this off with a figure called “Zantanicus”, among others. I salute him for a job well done!

Check out the entire gallery.

Award-Winning Butterfly

BisonFuehrer recently posted this award-winning creation. Though built back in ’97, it still has the ability to impress.

Monarch Butterfly 1997