Every week readers of the The Brothers Brick Telegram channel choose the Creation of the Week: one project that impressed all of us the most. Last week it all came down to a Pokemon versus a farm diorama… and the results are shocking! André Pinto grabs the award with his neat and detailed rural build. What a round!
Meanwhile, the new vote is already on! Join our Telegram channel to follow all the best LEGO creations, latest news, and, of course, vote for your favorites. See you there!
LEGO builder extraordinaire Anu Pehrson joins us to give an inside perspective on how she built this enormous 200,000-piece minifigure-scale diorama of the Wall from Game of Thrones. If you’re not familiar with Anu, she likes to build big. If you happen to be in Denmark soon, check out her huge model of the Greyjoy Stronghold, which has been showcased in the LEGO House for the past year. She previously gave us a behind-the-scenes look at her 20,000-piece rice plantation diorama from The LEGO Ninjago Movie, but now she’s gone ten times bigger. So read on as Anu walks us through the entire process of building the Wall from early concepts to finished model.
As builders, most of us are inspired by things we encounter in our everyday lives, travels, and other interests such as books, music, etc. I immensely enjoyed reading Game of Thrones and was inspired with several ideas for building. The Wall was an obvious choice but a very daunting task and would require me to get several tens of thousands of white parts. I started the process of collecting parts specifically for this project in 2012. Nine years later, I finally started building in 2021, and it has taken me over two years to finish it. The model is 5 x 5 feet and approximately 4.5 feet tall, and in the end, I used close to 200,000 pieces.
My thought process here was that the Wall would be the central grounding factor, with several structures added to both the south side of the Wall and the area beyond the wall to the north as described in the books/show.
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Because the suburbs weren’t rural enough, I just moved to the exurbs. Out here everything runs on propane, there’s a septic system and just taking out the trash involves a vehicle that apparently isn’t my hipster Beetle. With greenhouses, windmills, sheds, and tractors much of it looks just like this LEGO diorama built by André Pinto. All my new neighbors own tractors and they tell me that I won’t survive a winter without one. While I mull over that ominous portent, I gaze over André’s diorama with its pumpkins, tomatoes, birdhouses, chickens and especially that tractor. I even checked out the tractor catalog and thought; holy schniekes, these things are expensive! Maybe I’ll just settle for buying a trucker hat; I mean, I’ve gone my whole life without tractoring so why should that change now? Maybe I can be like André and just build them in LEGO. That sounds like a plan!
Hawaii Toad comes at us with a high-steaks LEGO build. No, that’s not a typo – someone’s brought a really high steak to this barbeque party! The minifigure accessory piece is already as big as a LEGO person’s head, but this really takes the mickey. It raises a lot of questions left unanswered by the build though. Firstly, what animal lends itself to such a big piece of meat? A T-rex?! I’d like to see the size of the butcher who sells that. For that matter, how big does your grill need to be for this? That’s surely going to take an age to cook if you want it done anything more than the rarest of rare!
I’m a sucker for a LEGO Adventurers build, and here Robert4168/Garmadon revisits a classic Adventurers setting in celebration of the theme’s 25th anniversary. The gang’s all here! Whilst Johnny Thunder scales ruins, the rest of the team are busy sailing to an extravagant temple emerging from the jungle. But in true Adventurers style, it’s not quite the abandoned monolith they were hoping for.
It’s worth keeping your eyes peeled, as many LEGO fans are building tributes to this great theme right now.
Now you might think that penguins, famous inhabitants of cold and snowy Antarctica, would not be one’s first idea of subjects for a summer LEGO diorama. But I’ve seen Surf’s Up, as I presume Ian Hou (DOGOD Brick Design) has, so this scene of a penguin family at the beach is not so far from the truth. I’m in love with their penguin design! They look very happy to be beside the seaside, each with an individual accessory to give them that extra dose of personality. And speaking of love — well, it seems one of those crabs in the foreground might have found a bit of holiday romance on their beach vacation!
With so many things to look at in this wonderful build by Kit Nugent, it might be easy to miss the drama unfolding on the steps of this pastoral scene in the forest. While the somewhat blocky trees are stars of this build, I like the little details, like using the underside of plates as roof tiles, and the dappled light filtering through the trees to land on the face of a mysterious woman. Showing the scene at an angle, and filling in the base with black really draws your eyes to the center of the scene.
LEGO builder BrickiboT pays homage to Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws movie and demonstrates why an entire generation was afraid to go into the water. Tough-as-nails shark hunter Quint was responsible for some of the movie’s most memorable scenes. When he slowly scratched his nails across a chalkboard, it simultaneously agonized audiences and cemented one of the most memorable character introductions in movie history. His off-color sea shanties were also kinda endearing but alas this shark-obsessed Ahab of the Spielberg world met a grizzly demise as illustrated in this diorama. Quint was quite the scene-chewer, in fact, but, as fate would have it, Jaws would become quite the (ahem) Quint-chewer. Sorry. I’ll just let myself out. Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies…
Jesse van den Oetelaar has crafted this LEGO serene scene of a place in Middle Earth called the Brandywine River. It’s not a location I’m overly familiar with, but a river filled with brandy and wine does sound like a heck of a party! Unfortunately it also sounds like a recipe for a disastrous hangover. But hey, the last time a bunch of hobbits had a party they ended up saving the world, so it can’t all be bad! Anyway, I love Jesse’s use of depth here. It’s partly thanks to some seamless editing. But even so, the LEGO portion of this build goes back a deceptively long way. Combined with the clever photography it makes us feel totally immersed in the scene… And the river!
Ever wondered how LEGO’s nano-figs are made? Caleb Schilling has given us a sneak peek at their production line mid-manufacture. Bet you thought it was all ABS and injection-moulding, eh? Think again! Now I’m no expert, but I believe that inside this machine, there are tiny little gremlins (smaller even than nano-figs) armed with tridents, who carve these pieces out of coloured plastic. These tools of theirs are wonderfully versatile. You can see two of them sticking out the side, which when pulled presumably give the gremlins a poke, so they know which shift to be on. Some older ones also seem to have been re-purposed for the conveyor belt. How resourceful! It’s a wonder such production methods aren’t used elsewhere, really.
(Hm? What do you mean, I’ve failed the trial period for TBB’s production expert…?)
Gnomes are tiny mythical creatures of European folklore. With that said, it is possible that the monster spider in the center of this LEGO creation by Mihał Ch is normal-sized. Still, a spider of any size gives me the heebie-jeebies so I wouldn’t want to be that wee little gnome explorer. It looks like he’s about to become a snack! I may stick around just long enough to admire the neat build techniques used in this underground terrain; the rocks and web design are amazing. The entire diorama is only six studs deep but the amount of detail rendered makes the cave seem to go on forever. But still, let’s hope the other things we feature soon will be less spider-centric!
My wife and I are re-reading The Lord of the Rings together after having done so 22 years ago before the first Peter Jackson movie was released. By sheer coincidence, on the same day we read the chapter about the Battle of Pelennor Fields in The Return of the King, Kiwi builder Pieter Dennison shared the conclusion of a months-long project to recreate a Mûmak or Oliphaunt of the Haradrim in LEGO, based on how they appear in the movies.
Pieter’s build features all the iconic details of the enormous beast, from its four tusks (built from a series of 2×2 round bricks presumably strung on something like flex-tube), each with spikes on the end, to the war tower on the monstrous beast’s back. A closer look at the war tower shows just how huge this LEGO build really is, with about a score of minifigs riding into battle against the Rohirrim and men of Gondor.
If you want to see this in person, you can see it at the Christchurch Brick Show this July. And don’t miss all the other LEGO Oliphaunts we’ve featured over the years (also proving that this quote is the only one I ever use to write about this creature).