Tag Archives: Creatures

Creepy crawly or fuzzy & fluffly (yes, that’s possible in LEGO), we love our LEGO animals. Check them out here, and fall in love yourself.

“Tiny Adventure” tells a huge story

Many builds featured here are stand-alone creations, frequently based on pre-existing material. So we were truly impressed to discover Tiny Adventure by Korean builder Yosool. Not only does this eclectic collection of brick-built characters incorporate a ton of play features, but each one also has a fully fleshed out backstory, woven into an overarching theme with a very specific goal: To help children appreciate the global ecological problem of adventive animals (aka invasive species).

To find out more about the fascinating world of Tiny Adventure, you can check out the full album of character photos, discover their backstories on Yosool’s website, watch the numerous play feature videos on his YouTube channel, and you can even support the project on LEGO Ideas.

In the builder’s own words: The story starts at a peaceful town of swamp. One day, adventive species suddenly appear, and turn the small town into a huge chaos. These predators are always hungry, and they devour every native species they can find. Extinction is only a matter of time. Tiny and Tale, green frog brothers native to the swamp town, put their heads together to solve the serious problem.”

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Fowl play

Since we first featured his masterful sculptures of an ape and rat, newcomer Felix Jaensch has been busy churning out many more creations inspired by exotic animals. Brothers Brick prediction: This is one to watch! Amongst the latest batch of bestial beauties are these colorful birds…

Beautiful LEGO: Wild! [Review]

Beautiful LEGO: Wild! is the third title in a series of best-selling coffee table books by Mike Doyle. Like its predecessors Beautiful LEGO and Beautiful LEGO 2: Dark, this edition features a carefully curated collection of LEGO creations by some of the community’s top builders.

Compared to its hefty hard-backed cousin DARK, this slimmer book is more reminiscent of the original Beautiful LEGO. Like DARK, its builder profiles are kept to a minimum and the focus is squarely on the photographs. Otherwise the format is the same, with images organized into categories and carefully labelled with info such as title, builder, year and part count.

To differentiate each new volume from the last, Mike has chosen to assign them over-arching themes. And while DARK was ambiguous enough to allow for a pretty diverse range of builds, WILD is necessarily more constrained to subject matter in some way related to plants, animals or nature. And since it doesn’t feature any of the nature-themed builds already used in the first two books, sections like the ones on bugs and dragons end up relying on some slightly less polished builds than readers of the earlier books might be used to seeing.

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Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint

Almost ten years after his previous foray into the middle east, mysterious artist/activist Banksy recently popped up in the Gaza Strip, in an effort to once again highlight the plight of people in this region. Flickr member TheBrickAvenger was inspired to recreate one of the Gaza pieces in LEGO:

Some LEGO “purists” may scoff at the choice of the stacked bricks technique used here. But hey, maybe the builder was using it to make a statement? Or maybe there was literally no other way to create this image convincingly at mini-fig scale. Either way, the result is impressive – especially when you consider the effort it must have taken! For context, here is a photo of the original:

Laugh it up, fuzzball!

Cute is not the first word that springs to mind when I think of a wookiee, although this is arguably a pretty rare occurrence. Fuzzball, as in the quote from Han Solo, seems rather more appropriate.

Using lots of 1×2 curved slopes, Flickr user umamen has managed to capture Chewbacca’s shaggy looks and, yet, somehow there is something cute about the end result. I think it’s in the facial expression.

Raising the Bar(bell) of LEGO creations

OK, so I admit I mostly just wanted to make a cheesy pun in the title, but Matt De Lanoy is currently engaged in another round of Iron Builder, that contest where two excellent builders are pitted against each other and every creation must contain one or more of a specific piece. Matt’s opponent is Tim Schwalfenberg, whose brilliant creation is featured in the previous post about the Isles of Aura. The seed part, as my title cleverly alludes, is the barbell. Here are a few of Matt’s sweet builds so far:

Get a Steely Hug from the Purple Dinosaur

This purple dinosaur probably has more Pokemon influence than the one you’re thinking of, but both have a man inside the suit. This Nidoking-inspired mecha is the brainchild of Stormbringer, and looks ready for an all-out poke-mecha battle.

BRICKNADO² contest ends soon!

Don’t be fooled by all this Pluto flyby nonsense – NASA is just trying to distract you from the fact that our BRICKNADO² building contest ends in one week! Hell yes, that’s just one week to craft your glorious LEGO tribute to the third (and hopefully silliest) installment of the Sharknado movie series.

Need inspiration? Then check out the Sharknado 3 trailer. Or pore over the entries from last year’s contest. Better still, pore over our prizes, each of which features at least one LEGO shark:

1st place: 60014 Coast Guard Patrol
2nd place: 60093 Deep Sea Helicopter
3rd place: 60092 Deep Sea Submarine

And that’s not all… Each winner will also receive a trophy in the form of a Sharnado pop vinyl:

You know what do to. So get to it. Don’t let NASA win this one…

A human’s best friend

Human sidekicks are so last week. The big videogame trend now is animal companions. And Microsoft has jumped on that bandwagon with it’s new game Recore, announced at the E3 conference last week. So Canadian builder Tyler Sky wasted no time in creating a fully poseable replica of what I suspect will end up being Recore’s most popular character.

This game is messed up

Video gaming has become so dominated by ‘shooters’ that Nintendo finally decided to get in on the action. But in a brilliant move they managed to create a family friendly one in the form of Splatoon – a new multiplayer team game for the Wii that takes the concept of paintball to a whole new level! I have a feeling this game is gonna be massive. Weapons master Nick Jensen was so impressed by it that he whipped up LEGO versions of a Splatoon character in both human and “Inkling” form.

It’s the wrong sheep, Gromit!

Fans of the Wallace and Gromit franchise will no doubt be familiar with Shaun the Sheep, the spin-off that spawned a spin-off and even a movie. Well now Palixa And The Bricks have recreated the show’s characters in LEGO – with great use of Bramsphere techniques to make the sheep suitably wooly.

We’re gonna need a bigger swat...

Proving that traditional stud-and-tube LEGO connections are sometimes old hat, the creature creations of Serbian builder Djordje are both studies in unusual building techniques, and examples of great character building. This latest one is appropriately named the Lord of the Flies:

If this guy ever needs backup, I think Djorde has him covered with earlier creations Sligmor the Backstabber and Hamrag the Stout (below). Check out the entire menagerie and pick your favorite!