I’m an artist but it may surprise some of you to learn that I wasn’t much into comic books as a kid. However, the few comics I had held a specil place in my heart. I had a few issues of Star Wars, Superman, The Hulk, even Spider-Man. Speaking of which, this mind-blowing LEGO creation by Bas van Houwelingen is made to look like a classic comic book cover. This uncanny technique uses both intentionally built sections as well as seemingly haphazardly poured elements to create an amazing cohesive image. Here we see a closeup of Spider-Man as well as Sandman’s fist creeping (or sifting) into the shot. As 3-D art goes, especially in LEGO, you’d normally build Spider-Man with parts of him red, other parts blue and call it a day. But as 2-D artists know, you can often use other colors in surprising ways to give the illusion of a 3-D image. Here we see white, yellow, pink, lavender, green and other colors used beautifully here to tell a complex story.

Not only that, but if you look closely, you may find LEGO elements you wouldn’t normally use to build Spider-Man such as flowers, boats, even a few minifigures. The builder tells us that this work of art took a week to design and is comprized of about 5000 LEGO bricks and utilizes nearly all the red and pink bits in their collection. This technique is a great way to use some of those less-utilized pieces in any collection.

If this already looks a bit familiar to you, then your sharp eyes may have seen that this was submitted to the LEGO Ideas Friendly Neighborhood Comic Book Hero Contest and it was the grand prize winner in the Brick category!