Tag Archives: Marco Gan

Two birds in hand is worth twenty bricks in total

I’m always stoked to see how much can be represented with so little. Micro builds always seem easy and gives me feeling of “Why didn’t I think of that??” but in fact, they’re a lot harder to pull off than you’d think, in getting something represented appropriately with the limited number of bricks on hand. The Lesser Adjutant is a species of the stork family found mostly in the regions of Southeast Asia, and Malaysian builder Marco Gan captures the likeness of these birds eloquently, with each made up of just ten LEGO elements.

10 pieces Lego Lesser Adjutant (秃鹳 / Burung Botak) Parit Jawa, Muar. (Make use of the crack brown plate As diorama base :p

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I’m a rhinoceros hornbill. How-do-you-do!

It never fails, someone builds an animal or another and it always makes me smile. What I like is beginning to become predictable. I hope you can be as enthralled by Marco Gan’s rhinoceros hornbill as I am. The rhinoceros hornbill (Buceros rhinoceros) is the state bird of the Malaysia state of Sarawak as well as the country’s National Bird. This particular cutey is a charming female as her eye is white with red rims made from a small wheel and tire assembly and a radar dish (males would have red with black rims). My favorite part is the tongue made from a snowboard. The hanging spider acts as a reminder that in the jungle, there is always something alive needing to eat. It is clear that Marco cares deeply about the animals of Southeast Asia, as this isn’t the first time he’s delighted us with jungle creatures. Check out these tapirs of his we featured previously.

Rhinoceros Hornbill

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Two tapirs to tickle your fancy

Animals always makes my day just a little brighter. My case in point, Marco Gan has built this pair of endangered Malayan Tapirs (Tapirus indicus) and I am tickled pink…or tickled black and white as it were. The adult looks dashing with its striking black and white piebald pattern but the baby steals my heart away with its horizontal stripes. The artist palette in green make for excellent lily pads while a nearly hidden pushbroom and paddle heads adds neat textures to the jungle flora. Marco tells us that in the Malay language, the tapir is commonly referred to as cipan, tenuk or badak tampung. No matter what you call it, this duo just might be the best thing I’ve seen all day, and I’ve seen a guy in an inflated dinosaur costume bouncing on a pogo stick.

Malayan Tapir (Tapirus Indicus)

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Let your fingers do the counting

If you blink or scroll a little too fast, you may just miss that these items are made of LEGO. Marco Gan reminisces about his younger days when his father did his daily ledger work using an abacus and a Chinese ledger. The writing on the ledger follows actual records he made. The beads of the abacus are built with, yes, you guessed it, LEGO tyres. The gold finishing gives it an authentic touch of antiquity, leaving us in awe about how much we’ve advanced since the days when these were the essential tools of a merchant. Of course, some older folks today still claim that they can calculate faster using an abacus than you can on a digital calculator…

Traditional Chinese Ledger and abacus

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