Joseph Zawada built this jaw-dropping rendition of Hyrule Castle from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Joseph displayed it at Brickfair Virginia earlier this month, where it was a huge hit. After spending 2.5 years piecing it together, Joseph is rightly very proud of his masterpiece, which features great details such as the gradated water and nifty roof techniques.
Our friends at Beyond the Brick have a great on-location interview with Joseph at Brickfair:
The best sleuth in the business is back at it, in brick form this time, thanks to the handiwork of Hacim Bricks and UmmWho. This particular iteration is, of course, from the popular and much lauded BBC series Sherlock.
Our friends over at Beyond the Brick also did a short video on it when it was recently displayed at BrickFair Virginia.
As regular readers of the blog may know, Nick Kappatos and I build a joint display every year for BrickFair. This year, we wanted to contrast between organic and mechanical, as well as high-tech sci-fi and low-tech creations. We also just really wanted to build a bustling bazaar. It was also high time to work some motion into the display, even it it was simple. While the motion isn’t terribly complex, I have to say that I think Nick’s rotating ring has a perfectly sci-fi feel to it that I love (and can’t take credit for). I also tried my wobbly hand at a fly-through video… with an iphone.
Japanese builder Takeshi Itou has been one of the most influential castle builders in the LEGO community, raising the bar worldwide, beginning when fans were first discovering each other online. His gorgeous castles rely largely upon older pieces and clean lines, clearly inspired by the golden age of LEGO castle lines in the 1980s. Takeshi’s latest piece is this gorgeous elven safehold.
When Takeshi began posting his castles in the early 2000s, he took the fan community by storm, and his influence still ripples down through many well-known builders today. While current trends in castle building emphasize a ramshackle aesthetic, with rough edges and extreme amounts of detail, Takeshi’s work remains in the style of the classic official sets, pushing that aesthetic to new heights. Brothers-Brick has been covering his work since the blog began 10 years ago, and one of my favorite pieces is this replica of Hikone Castle in Japan. 8 years after its creation it is still well worth checking out. Takeshi’s Volcano Tower also was enormously influential on my own building style in the early 2000s, showing me that dioramas with landscaping were possible at a time when the majority of builders still placed their structures on naked baseplates.
A few weeks ago, Nannan posted The Defense of La Haye Sainte Farm at the Battle of Waterloo. While impressive, this was only a small part of a much larger diorama that was unveiled at Brickfair Va., to commemorate the 200th anniversary of this historic battle.
This impressive display was a collaborative effort by Joshua Brooks, his father Gary Brooks (Gary^the^procrastinator) and Casey Mungle, Ken Rice and John Rudy, with further contributions by several more members of Wamalug. It was not only large, but also tremendously well-researched. The formations of figures and their uniforms were chosen to be period-accurate, for instance. The size of the diorama had the consequence that, when sitting at one end and looking at the other, it was impossible to focus your eyes on the whole thing at once. This made the hundreds of sometimes fairly rare minifigures really look like armies on the march. In fact, there were so many figures on this display, that this may be the very reason why some of them have become so rare!
Edit: The guys from Beyond the Brick have posted an interview with Gary at Brickfair, which is well worth checking out.
WingYew takes us time traveling in an unnamed city with a MOC that spans a hundred years, from the arrival of streetcars to the proliferation of megachains. The dueling coffeeshops are replete with excellently detailed interiors and give a striking sense of how little has changed – and exactly how much has changed.
Tristan made this beautiful scene as a tribute to two friends who recently passed away. I was struck by the realism of the sun’s burning disk and the great use of forced perspective, and I think it makes a lovely memorial.
On the last rock in the south, there lies a great fortress. Bustling with Imperial Guards and fortified against bloodthirsty pirates, this fortress by Greg Dix stands a monument to the Imperial might flexing its power across the globe.
Actually, I don’t know what empire LEGO’s Imperial Guards are meant to represent. I’ve always thought of them as the plastic manifestation of Britain’s colonial-era power, but I’ve seen some evidence that the line grew out of LEGO’s attempt to create a Napoleonic theme, so they may be French. Greg’s title implies the setting for this bastion is Portugal, so perhaps they are Portuguese here. Provenance aside, the fort has working winches and is rigged to light up. Greg built this in March, and I’m not sure how we missed it before, but I’m happy I stumbled upon it today, because it’s lovely.
I’m not ashamed to say that I’m incredibly excited for Star Wars Episode VII. The trailer is filled with amazing shots and locales, not least of which is that haunting panning shot of the crashed Star Destroyer on the planet Jakku. LEGO builder KevFett2011 was also struck by the imagery, and he’s turned out this fantastic diorama of the dune-swept spaceship.
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:
This week Hong Kong hosted its gigantic annual fan convention Ani-Com, an event that makes San Diego Comic Con look like a book club meeting at a Starbucks. Local builder Alanboar Cheung was a finalist in the show’s LEGO building contest, with this delightful and very stylish “Dream House”:
This thing is packed to overflowing with awesome details – the closeups are definitely worth a look.
This event always produces some stellar MOCs, but information is a bit hard to come by. We’ll show you more of them as they come across our radars.
Gary^The^Procrastinator captured a defining moment in the Battle of Waterloo in this scene depicting the defense of La Haye Sainte Farm where 400 British and German troops held against overwhelming waves of French forces. Check out more photos on Flickr and see this diorama in person as part of the Battle of Waterloo collaboration that will be on display at Brickfair Virginia in August.
