Tag Archives: Immersive Scene

And everything under the sun is in tune

Every once in a while we get a build that is out of this world. Not only because of techniques or parts usage, but because it is a work of art made with LEGO pieces. Ring-Rise by Tom Loftus (Inthert) is exactly that. A colourful painting. A cinematic shot with perfect framing. Just an astronaut and his cat, all alone on a monochrome alien world, looking out on the colourful rings of a planet. A simple idea, flawless execution.

Ring-Rise

Tom knew he wanted to incorporate the famous basalt columns of Iceland into a build. The Alien Landscape category of the yearly Space Jam contest was the perfect opportunity. Layering them in shades of grey (black to dark grey to light grey) give the impression of light coming in from the space-scape beyond. The planetary ring uses Simon Pickard’s intricate curving surface technique that few have mastered. Tom spiced it up by making it as colourful as he could, evoking the psychedelic hues of nebulae and other heavenly bodies.

Check out more builds by Tom here!

TBB Cover Photo for January 2022: The king’s royal hangover

Why is the start of the new year in the middle of winter? It’s dark and cold out, everyone is tired. Even indoors can be dark and cold, just like this grand high-ceilinged throne room built by Andreas Lenander. After a night of celebrations within his keep, the noble king returns to his throne with a royal hangover to ponder the existential dilemma of ruling instead of partying. Or he may be wondering what’s taking his servant so long to fetch the breastplate stretcher…

The burdens of a king...

We recently wrote about this grand royal hall, but we decided to use this immersive and atmospheric shot as the cover photo for our social media platforms. Despite my questionable interpretation of the scene (and one too many Bobby B references), the composition of this build and the photo speaks for itself as good storytelling. The king positioned on the white carpet draws the eye to the throne looming in the darkness, prompting the pondering of his situation. Does the darkness mean that his kingdom is in peril? Do the columns signify that the king is trapped in a risky position of power (and he’d rather be spending his life partying with peasant girls)? Ok, I’ll stop now.

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Star Wars isn’t just about fast ships and gunfights

It’s also about stunning vistas, and run-down buildings at the far edge of the galaxy. In this scene by GorillaGluedLEGO featuring a weather-worn structure in the middle of a jungle landscape, a lone figure feeds a small critter. He looks like a simple Bith trying to make his way in the universe. Or her way, it’s hard to tell with Bith, and most Star Wars names are pretty ambiguous. At any rate, there are lots of great details in this somewhat chaotic scene. The foreground is cluttered with various broken things, including an astromech, and what looks like a moisture vaporator, although it feels a bit out of place in a jungle. The building has some wonderful worn effects using color and texture to distress the exterior. There is another nice part usage in the vines wrapped around the trees, made from the plastic bit that is found surrounding leaf elements.

Diaca Glasim

Like a bridge over troubled waters

One thing better than a model by a super-skilled LEGO builder is a model by two super skilled LEGO builders. Joe (jnj_bricks) and Brick Ninja teamed up to create the Temple of the Rising Sun, a moment of battle captured for RebelLUG’s Kingdoms at War II contest. Brick Ninja handled the foreground’s battle scene, fortress, and bridge. Joe created the temple and background landscapes. The cool thing to me is how integrated both builds are. The repeated motifs of circular gold rings, wall textures, vegetation style, and red accents unify the two creations into a seamless whole.

Temple of the Rising Sun

Brick Ninja’s fortress is alive with interesting shapes and creative part usage in the torches. The bridge is elegant and action-packed. And be sure to spend some time zooming in on the background to appreciate the great forced perspective building from Joe. And when you’ve soaked up all you can from this image, go look in our archives for more great temple builds!

 

Every gateway has two sides

Contests are a great way to bring the LEGO community together, and the Summer Joust has been a great example of that. We’ve featured a number of great creations from that event, but this one has a little something extra – two builders. Simon Liu is responsible for the foreground, while Roanoke Handybuck handled the exterior landscape. I admire the stonework on The Gateway quite a bit; it has a real Lord of the Rings Dwarvish vibe to it. The angular designs blend in well with the uncut rock around the opening. Outside, the bright colors and organic shapes provide a stark contrast. Thanks to clever photography, there’s just enough of the light shining through the door to unify the different creations.  Which side of the gateway do you want to be on?

The Gateway

If this image has whetted your appetite for immersive LEGO scenes, be sure to check out more of our spotlighted builds!

I hate sleeping in hotels!

I’ve met a few people who prefer staying at hotels to being in their own house and bed, but they seem to be a strange minority. I mean, who really wants to sleep in a bed where the night before some strangers did something not fit to be described in an upright publication, rather than their own comfortable and familiar bed back home? Eww! Anyways, my own stays at hotels have never been as bad as the terrified LEGO minifigure’s night in this build by Jarek Książczyk. If I saw an eerily-lit giant hand outside the window of my Marriott room, I’d be huddled on the bed, too.

?? ????

Jarek has captured everything one would expect to see in a hotel room, down to the horrid vertically striped beige wall paper, but then you see that there’s a piano in the corner. What hotel has a piano in the rooms? None that I know of. So perhaps this isn’t a hotel after all, but the minifigure’s own comfortable and familiar bed…in which case I might go stay in a hotel. Even soiled bed linens would be better than that hand. Then again, maybe it was just a nightmare. Things do look much brighter in the morning light.

?????

Mission Impossible: Prospector Edition

With a skillful use of only 101 elements, Markus Rollbühler takes a deep dive into adventure with 101 Bricks: Dangerous Descent. There are tons fun details, but did you recognize the rocky Bionicle baseplates (turned on their side) that form the walls? I also love the use of monochrome minifigures as carved statues in the background. Looks like there’s some history behind the golden T-Rex. (Hold on. How did an ancient culture know about T-Rexes? Man, this build is just full of mysteries.)

101 Bricks: Dangerous Descent

This build is actually a continuation of the story Markus started in 101 Bricks: Discovery. The part limit comes from the RogueOlympics, a contest that has lead to a lot of great featured builds. Check our archives out for more compact goodness from the event!

I want much more than this provincial life

It takes a careful eye for detail to craft a large LEGO immersive scene since every corner of the frame has to be considered. But it also takes a large number of LEGO bricks, far more than one would think before beginning the project (especially for the foreground, which always needs more, always). Talented LEGO builder Joe (jnj_bricks) has both the careful eye and the pile of bricks and uses them masterfully to craft this castle harbor scene, with a quay, lots of shops, a castle, and even a drunken pirate down on the dock. It certainly fits the bill as a large scene, too, measuring 144×80 studs.

A Cloudy Day

Joe neglects no surface in the scene, from the textured roofs to the detailed walls. There are slight variations in color to show weathering, and no two houses have the same wat-and-daub pattern. The selling point is the minifigure posing, however, which can be one of the trickiest bits to nail down, but Joe got it just right, with dynamic and natural poses all around. It really sells that this is a normal day with people going about their ordinary lives. Pretty sure I see the baker with the same old bread and loaves to sell. And do you see the goat? He’s got a goat, the Holy Grail of castle builders!

A Day at the Docks

Sittin’ on the porch, enjoyin’ the view

Just this evening, after we finished our dinners, my kids, wife, and I sat out on our front porch enjoying the warm, sunny weather while eating our popsicles for dessert. It was quite the treat to sit there, watching the world go by, barefoot on a rocking chair. The way I felt while sitting there is the same way I feel looking at this LEGO scene by Elias Hübner. There’s the warm light of the setting sun, the verdant green of the lawn and garden, and reminders of yard work that still needs to be done. Sure, my own garden is not as green as this one, and none of my flowers have bloomed, and I haven’t had to mow yet. But the mood is there. And it is pure summer bliss.

Sunset View

This is Elias’s latest build for the Iron Builder competition. The seed part this round is the obscure “Large Figure Part Shield Holder with Axle” in blue, used in many ways throughout the build, from chair cushions to a birdhouse, as well as lawn mower bits and flowers and exterior lamps. But my favorite use is definitely that watering can. Just perfect!

Cooking up something special with bananas

The LEGO banana element is not necessarily the most useful piece, right? It has only one connection point, at one end, and no matter what you do with it, it still looks like a banana. That has not stopped LEGO from using it all over the place, whether that be gold bananas in Ninjago sets, grey ones in Mixels, or white, teal, and dark blue from various Chinese festival sets; but it still looks like a banana. But when I was taking my almost-two-year-old to the bathroom the other day, I realized that the handles on the faucet looked remarkably banana-like, with the same curve and general shape. So that got me thinking: could I make a kitchen that used a banana sink? In my own collection, I have only yellow and gold bananas, so it had to be a gold sink, but brass is coming back in, right? Or was it in, and now it’s back out again?

The Nocturnal Kitchen

The rest of the kitchen came together around the sink, scaled to that. It’s loosely based off of the kitchens from my last two houses in layout, though the dishwasher should be to the right of the sink for better accuracy. It ended up using almost all my dark brown tiles and bricks and plates (as well as slopes!) for the cabinets, so I’m glad I did not go bigger, and if you look closely at the sand green walls, you’ll see that they are largely made of 1×2 plates. I am not looking forward to taking this one apart. The ceiling came last, but I knew I needed one, since I wanted an immersive shot, and those always look more convincing with the ceiling and a controlled light source. So I made it studded, to replicate the horrible textured ceilings that so many houses have (including my own), and made the light for the photograph come through the ceiling fixture, with a little reflecting in from the window and the banana moon (which would have been better in white, admittedly). I’m fairly pleased with the build, though I do think the floor is ugly, and so does my wife, but that’s the tiles I had in abundance, so that’s what I used. Maybe we’ll remodel it someday.

If you like this build, you’ll probably like this collection of LEGO kitchen builds. And don’t forget to tune in to the Iron Forge competition, where the banana is the seed part.

Not all bounty hunters are Mandalorians

I’m one of those annoying Star Wars fanboys who liked Boba Fett for no good reason. What did he do to deserve the adulation poured down upon him? Nothing. Ok, he had some menacing lines, and cool looking gear, and an awesome spaceship that flew the wrong way (or maybe landed the wrong way), but beyond that all he did was get embarrassingly knocked into a Sarlacc mouth by a blind guy with a spear. But as we all know by now, bounty hunting is a complicated profession, and the popular love for Mandalorians and their ilk has only grown, getting featured in The Attack of the Clones, The Clone Wars, Rebels, and even getting their own eponymous show. My love has grown correspondingly, too. So when one of the categories for this year’s Space Jam was to build a LEGO bounty hunting ship, I was all about that, and started making something inspired by the Razor Crest.

Harvester II

Click to read more about my design process

Sounds good to me.

Stellar photography and LEGO construction collide in this amazing Green Arrow scene by Andrew Cookston. Andrew has made use of custom minifigures and accessories as well as traditional LEGO elements  to bring this comic book panel to life. This battle with villain Onomatopoeia just speaks to us. Because, you know, onomatopoeia. 

BANG!

If this style of image appeals to you, check out the other immersive scenes we’ve featured!