Fall is right around the corner, and in some places, has completely arrived and settled in. I’d wager that’s the case for this beautiful micro LEGO countryside diorama from Full Plate, with the beautiful fall foliage and the crops ready for harvest.
There’s quite a bit of detail here; the cottages are adorable and simple, and highly effective. the trees are bursting with color and you can clearly identify the different kinds. The dock into the pond is a nice touch.
It’s one thing to say that a plague of locusts, cicadas, or grasshoppers has gone after your crops. It’s another thing entirely when they destroy the entire farm. sanellukovic has posted what can only be a thing of nightmares with elephant-sized grasshoppers destroying the remains of what I imagine was once a farm, full of life. Not so much anymore.
Click to see details of the carnage
Built for BrickFair Virginia, this lovely diorama was displayed in full for the first time. Gary^The^Procrastinator has been working on it for some time and I must say the finished product is wonderful. Each time I look at it, I find a different detail.
Each of the buildings themselves are excellent examples of castle buildings. Seeing them all together, with minfigs throughout, brings the whole display to life.
“Elaborate” and “enchanting.” As simply as that, these two words define Japanese culture for me. Surprisingly, this pair of words perfectly suits these two LEGO creations below.
Andrew JN charms us with this tiny diorama. It is hardly bigger than a medium Creator set, but take your time to choose what exactly you’re going to behold first: an astonishing roof, some charming usage of color in trees or river water calmly flowing by.
Gzu Bricks presents us another tiny vignette featuring one of the giant bonshō bells. I especially love that both creations are of the same concept — Japanese architecture surrounded by Japanese flora — but look how different building techniques are! Gzu Bricks’ build might look a little simpler, but I can’t imagine anything that could make it more complete.
Recently Heikki Mattila has been building scenes depicting cool-looking interiors, like the LEGO spa we covered a few weeks ago. This latest diorama wouldn’t look out of place in an IKEA catalog — a smart, modern living space, all geometric lines and stark colors. The clock is a nice touch, and I like the tree in its stylish pot, but what makes this image pop for me is the splash of red provided by the sofa cushions. This is a great example of what happens when a nice model combines with decent photography and an eye for a smart color scheme — great stuff.
Gabe Umland brings us this nifty vibrant LEGO floating rock, topped with a warehouse for steampunkery. Never underestimate a mundane subject for your models — nearly anything can look magical when built with skill, even an industrial warehouse in the middle of the sky. Don’t miss Gabe’s great technique for paneled siding using stacked and twisted 1×1 bricks, and be sure to scrutinize the hodgepodge of goods for sale; scenes such as this are a way to find uses for that pile of unusual pieces you have.
You’d imagine a LEGO gym model would be stuffed full of minifigs in exercise poses. Not so this scene from Mrbones Bricks — the place is completely empty except for the lonely janitor. The gym’s interior is nicely built — don’t miss the hanging punchbag, the lockers, and the electrical conduit and fuseboxes on the wall. However, it’s the composition of the photo which turns this into a striking image. The expanse of empty floor awaiting the janitor’s attention creates a real sense of emptiness and quiet.
LEGO’s Nexo Knights line has brought us some great new pieces and some cool recolored parts, but aside from a few isolated examples, the theme hasn’t sparked a wave of fan-built creations. This recon outpost model from Henry F. stood out as a result. This scene captures all the elements which excite me about Nexo — a perfect blend of medieval castle and hi-tech, the bright color scheme, and the robots. I like the asymmetry of the base, with the composition balanced out around the shield at the center, giving the image a focal point.
The texture in the castle wall is really well done, with attractive splashes of blue to break up all that light grey. It contrasts nicely with the brown and green of the terrain. Where the contrast isn’t working quite as well is with the figures — they’re a little lost in amongst that stonework. Maybe next time the minfigs should be some of the non-grey ones?
A few weeks back, Graham Gidman wowed us with his LEGO barrel-riding scene from The Hobbit. Now he brings us this wonderful little diorama. The stonework on the cottage walls is fabulous, and the curved roof with its spattering of studs makes for a lovely shape.
The smooth flow of the roof is reflected in the curve of the fence, and the whole thing sits on a nicely-built landscape base making effective use of multiple shades of green and earth tones. There’s some lovely touches of detail on show too — check out the little log pile under the cottage’s eaves. The only thing which doesn’t quite work for me is the continuation of the round stonework up into the chimneystack. However, that’s nit-picking — overall, this is a cracking piece of building.
Heikki Mattila has built a wonderfully calm LEGO spa. The details here are simply perfect — the bath itself, the drinks shelf, the candles, and the nice touch of the rolled towels and soap on the little table. That back wall tiling is very well done, exactly the sort of color scheme and layout you’d expect to find in such a classy and relaxing venue. Normally I’m not a fan of room models without some kind of minifig presence to bring them to life, but this scene doesn’t need it. In fact, the absence of minifigs only serves to enhance the sense of peace and quiet.
Originally, the so-called “information superhighway” was a metaphor. Information would still be flowing along telecom trunk lines, just like it had before. The amount of info available through those same old lines was the real story of the early 1990s. But fast forward a few decades, to a future imagined by Carter Baldwin and Simon Liu: there’s so much information that a highway can barely contain it. Miles and miles of high-speed cable, just below the actual roadway. I’m not sure what’s going on in the wild undergrowth beneath the infrastructure, but that doesn’t interest me nearly as much as the infrastructure itself. The tubes! The girders!
We’ve seen a number of official LEGO Star Wars AT-ATs over the years, but they’ve all shared one fatal flaw: They’re just not as enormous as the menacing, walking beasts that first strode across the screen in The Empire Strikes Back. Mechanical engineering student Noah has built a properly scaled, 5,000-piece LEGO AT-AT that — at 2 feet tall — towers over minifig Snowtroopers and Hoth Rebel troops alike.
Noah tells The Brothers Brick that it took him about a year to build his AT-AT — a bit longer than it might have taken if he hadn’t been at school.
You can see a walk-around video that Noah posted on his YouTube channel, where he also has in-progress videos showing the internal structure.
We asked Noah whether his schooling in mechanical engineering helped him build such a large model. He tells us that the AT-AT’s head is particularly heavy, causing a moment of force, with the head extending far out from the AT-AT’s main body and affecting its center of gravity, which he solved by integrating Technic beams into the neck.
Click through to see more photos of this huge LEGO AT-AT