Tag Archives: Colors

MOCs of the LEGO Masters: Finding joy in friendship and colors

Have you ever tried following the instructions for an iconic LEGO set, only subbing in colors from your own collection? It’s a fun way to experience an iconic build while expressing your own artistic voice (and thanks to LEGO making instructions free to download, you can save money too!) That’s just what Marcella did with this alternate take on the Birch Books modular apartment unit. Marcella’s bright colors bring a funky San Francisco vibe and pair perfectly with the new artist resident. Marcella and her best friend Krista are bringing that free spirit to the new season of LEGO Masters. Best of luck, you two!

This is part of our series on MOCs of the Masters where we preview the work of the newest batch of LEGO Master contestants. Have a look at creations from other builders in the lineup.

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MOCs of the LEGO Masters: Other brothers brick get ready for the big day

Ben Grayson has been featured a few times on The Brothers Brick, but this week the builder is taking brick brotherhood to another level as he joins LEGO Masters season 5 alongside his brother Michael. Ben completed this pre-show piece as a color challenge, contrasting yellowish green foliage with lavender moss. We’re big fans of floating rocks around here, and Ben makes this motif soar on a small footprint with excellent verticality and crisscrossing vines as a dynamic flourish. Ben pairs the build with a little narrative. Fisherman Bjorn Clidestine is journeying far from home, an old man alone into the Aether on a desperate mission to help his starving village. Good luck, Bjorn, and good luck to the brothers Grayson!

This is part of our series on MOCs of the Masters where we preview the work of the newest batch of LEGO Master contestants. Have a look at creations from other builders in the lineup.

50 shades of LEGO fun

Back in 2021, we featured an amazing set of monochrome habitats from Caz Mockett featuring every color brick available at the time. As LEGO continutes to introduce new colors, the potential spectrum of habitats has grown since then. This time builder Dana Knudson has accepted the nigh-impossible mission of creating a minifig habitat using only parts from a single LEGO color, this time hitting a total of 50 unique hues. Neon yellow and coral are some of the newly possible configurations that Dana includes.

Monochrome habitats like these are such a fun way to explore the relationship between color and shape in LEGO’s vast catalog of elements. While some colors offer a vast array of options, other colors, can be a challenge to build with. Some, like sand red, can be quite expensive to source. But the results are spectacular. And seeing how different builders create their own little scene from those constraints is inspiring.

In addition to playing with monochrome builds, Dana also created habitats celebrating 40 years of LEGO Space themes that you’ll enjoy getting lost in.

Joy is an infinite spectrum

Being diagnosed with autism as an adult isn’t easy. Maybe, like me, you grew up with a very narrow understanding of what autism meant based on a few harmful stereotypes. Maybe you learn strategies to cope and “mask,” but you can never escape those moments that leave you feeling broken or alien. Thankfully neurodiversity has largely moved from taboo topic to a source of community, empathy, and self acceptance. Understanding that autism is a spectrum and not a box is key, and it’s why the infinite spectrum has become a symbol for Autism awareness and a reminder that with infinite diversity comes infinite potential. It’s what inspired LEGO builder Margit to create this work titled “Autistic Joy.” As Margit says: “I want them to be proud of who they are, joyfully autistic. I love my brain and myself. It’s taken decades to get to this point, and I’m celebrating with this flora and fauna 3D mosaic. I hope you like it.”

Margit recreates the the rainbow spectrum using LEGO bricks, drawing on elements that give her joy to express this hopeful message. Like last year’s Milky Way set or the art of Jiwoo Seon, Margit’s mosaic is full of texture and uses clever connections to draw in a wide range of disparate elements that only reveal themselves up close. Seeing a crab holding up an apple certainly brings me joy!

Considering how neurospicy the LEGO community is, it’s great to see the LEGO Group continue to recognize and support with efforts in schools and the recent Hidden Disabilities Sunflower program.

A colorful blast to the medieval past

A medieval LEGO scene with nary a brick in black, white, or grey? It’s harder than you might think, but castle fan Klaas de Wit proves more than up to the challenge with the village of Tranquil Brook, “where everything is calm except the colors.” The bustling tableau makes up for the lack of swords and masonry with vibrant foliage, brightly painted buildings, a traveling goldsmith, and plenty of livestock. The colors and church steeple remind me of a Scandinavian village in the summertime. Klaas’ model is a great reminder that sometimes adding constraints can be a great way to unlock creativity.

Klaas built the Tranquil Brook for the first round of the Summer Joust, an annual contest for LEGO Castle fans that always inspires amazing medieval builds from the LEGO community. We can’t wait to see more colorful Castle creations in the days to come!

Are spheres the new DOTS?

LEGO DOTS brought the technique of building geometric mosaics from tiny tiles to a broader audience, and the humble 1×1 quarter circle tile was the workhorse of that line. Builder Palixa and the Bricks employs hundreds of these tiles on a particularly challenging canvas for a mosaic – a sphere! The results are beautiful from every angle, as soothing to look at as it must have been for Palixa to build.

This series allows Palixa to combine some of her favorite things: LEGO, mosaics, colors, and math. If the series continues, what polyhedron will she apply her tiling magic to next? A pyramid, perhaps? Personally, I’m hoping for an icosahedron.

“Orange you glad I didn’t say red panda”

Amid the social media universe of artists, there is a creative prompt known as the color wheel challenge. The artist must complete a separate piece for each wedge of a color wheel, typically consisting of red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, purple, and pink. And LEGO character builder extraordinaire Steven Howard (aka Ghalad) has taken up the challenge in brick form with this first submission for the orange slice. Despite the misnomer, it’s fair to say that a red panda is quite the orange beast. But I’m pretty sure (and feel free to fact-check me on this one, dear readers) that a red panda has never presided over a fiefdom in the history of the animal. Nevertheless, fiction or not, this is still a dynamite character exuding all the regal glory that Ailurus fulgens can muster. Very much looking forward to the next wedge, Ghalad!

And if you’d like to see more of Steven’s awe-inspiring work, please take a look in our archives.

Forcing us to think about color through forced perspective

Forced perspective is one of those artist’s buzzwords (or phrases) that means to achieve the illusion of a vast depth of field within a very narrow space. LEGO artist Jaap Bijl understands forced perspective quite well. The central road bisecting the composition down the middle appears to trail off into the long distance, but from the sky to the foreground, the composition is no more than twenty studs deep.

The builder tells us the width is more than a meter across, which certainly helps create the illusion of depth. The other trick Jaap clearly understands is the use of color. This is a world bursting with color for sure but the brightest of which is relegated only to objects in the extreme foreground. Midground is awash in a bit more subdued pastels, clueing us in that, even that far down the road, this is a colorful world but dialing back the intensity and details helps create the illusion of depth. The sky shifts the color palette and dials back the amount of detail, giving us a suitable background. This builder is a true artist indeed, but check out our Jaap Bijl archives to see what I mean.

This one-color cottage is a real “passion project”

In an effort to improve my LEGO building game while I continue my endless sort, I’ve been doing some deep dives recently into color. And right on the heels of finishing The Secret Lives of Color (by Kassia St. Clair and a very good read), I spy this beautiful cottage scene by the one and only Ralf Langar. The build speaks to the importance of the color red, and how we interpret it in our lives. While it can be the color of leaves, as in his darling ruby tree here, it also can symbolize such energizing things as life, heat, and love. Of course, as Ralf knows, you can sometimes have too much of a good thing: what once was love can quickly turn into passion, danger, war, and even blood. And a cottage with red-splattered windows doesn’t bode well for its occupants….

Who knew a dragon could be so gorgeous?

I have to say, as a writer for TBB, I’ve seen A LOT of custom builds. I spend far too much of my time scanning Flickr and Instagram for the next awesome piece of art to share with you all. Maybe it’s the fantasy nerd in me, but this… is exceptional. This dragon, built by talented LEGO designer, Wes Talbott, is all sorts of awesome. The ombre, rainbow-esque coloring is so perfectly executed! Making it for The LEGO House collection, he fittingly calls it, “Chromalagous” but the beauty goes beyond the color palette.

The placement of the scales is so organic and detailed, it truly looks like the skin of a giant reptile. It certainly doesn’t look like LEGO at first glance. And I don’t know about you, but I find myself with my mouth agape, muttering “how?” questions. Those horns?! I’d love to get a look at the internal structure, but this has to take a great deal of sculpting talent. What techniques does he use to make all those odd angles? Your guess is as good as mine.

Wes is a prolific artist, both in LEGO and graphically. Check out some of his official work in our archives, including reviews of the new 21327 Typewriter and 21325 Blacksmith Shop.

Monochrome minifig habitats in all colours!

Taste the rainbow? No, that doesn’t seem right. Build the rainbow! With minifigs in matching colours! That’s better. Caz Mockett did exactly that when she undertook the challenge of building isometric minifigure habitats in most of the current LEGO colours. The massive rainbow collage you see below is beautiful, but the vignettes really shine individually. Take a closer look and notice the details and parts usage. Each isometric habitat tells a unique story of the minifig and their surroundings.

Few builders tackle the challenge of building in monochrome, working with LEGO elements of the same colour. When they do, it’s usually in white or a shade of grey, and the build is something sculptural. Caz on the other hand went for all the zany colours LEGO has to offer, from earthen tones to magentas and azures. She shows true dedication in collecting rare and expensive minifigure parts for her coloured habitats.

Check out each minifig habitat in Caz’s photo album, or hear the builder talk about them in her YouTube videos documenting each build.

Color out of space

We see plenty of spaceships here at The Brothers Brick but we rarely see any that are quite as colorful as this one. A LEGO builder who goes by the name of F@bz has conjured up a space tanker that would look right at home in a carnival…parade…fire? Carnival parade fire. I’m seeing some very retro pieces that may have been pilfered from some old Aquazone sets from about 1996 or so. The tanker pieces, or at least the ones with the “AT.02” decal, come from the Exo-Force Mobile Assault Tank from 2006. If ever F@bz gets tired of this colorful model (but who would, really?) it can get pried apart using the two new dark turquoise brick separators included in the design. Now that is totes fabs!