With the recent passing of legendary builder Nate Nielson, better known to all of us as “nnenn”, we’re going to spend the next week commemorating him with a retrospective of his best builds.
One of my all-time favorites is this microscale carrier:
Be sure to join us in sharing your own thoughts on Nate’s online eulogy.
Checking the links in the last post brought me to this gorgeous green bike by Pierre E Fieschi:
Yes, those are the minifig stands from 7595 Army Men on Patrol.
While we’re at it, I can’t pass up this Spark-class microscale space carrier:
This is just a fun micro space station by Philip Stark (Erdbeereis1) in a theme he calls Spatlantis. In addition to the little construction details, I like the overall feel of a jellyfish combined with a mechanical space station.
Justin Vaughn’s latest addition to his Micro city (Micropolis) is a thing of sheer beauty. Built to TwinLug’s Micro City Standard, the whole build seems effortless.
Check out the rest of his set to see other great Micro creations!
My latest creation is a good example of what happens when a builder gets carried away with a simple concept. My simple concept was to use blue bubble domes as microcolonies, which grew into a large mass that I am calling The Death Ring (see story on Flickr).
The large dome is constructed from stretcher hoses that maintain the shape without central supports. The smaller domes contain glow-in-the-dark disks that give off an eerie light in the dark to simulate the glow of the bioluminescent spheres in space. The size of the model may look deceptive due to all the small greebly bits that play with your sense of scale, but the actual diameter is 1.5 feet.
I recently came across a quote by Ace Kim, the admin of FBTB, who said “a good picture of a terrible model will look better and be more appealing than a terrible picture of a good model.”
To a degree this is very true, which brings us to this interview with Fredo Houben (Fredoichi), a LEGO builder and graphic designer from the Netherlands. Granted, his models aren’t terrible — in fact they’re actually amazing.
What contributes to our enjoyment of Fredo’s creations is not simply the way he puts his bricks together but also his flawless presentation. As a bonus in this interview, Fredo goes through the steps he uses to edit a mediocre photo into a polished image.
The Brothers Brick: What do you like to build and where do you get your ideas and inspirations?
Fredo: Well, I mostly build in the sci-fi theme. Think of starfighters, multiped walkers/mecha and near-future vehicles. Occasionally I step out of that realm and do something else with the brick, but it’s sci-fi that I enjoy the most.
I find it fun and interesting to vary and play with scale, though I don’t make the biggest things out there.
I really like the challenge of building in a smaller scale. As for ideas and inspirations, I have a lot of interest in the design aspects of things like video games, movies, animation and Japanese toys, and that’s basically what gets things going.
TBB: When did you enter the online LEGO community and have you had a dark age? If so, how did you rediscover LEGO?
Fredo: I uploaded my first MOC on Flickr in 2008, since then LEGO is part of my life again. I say again because I stopped playing/building when I was 12 years old. I’m 36 now, so yeah I’ve had quite a dark age. Back then I played with LEGO day in and day out ever since I was 4. I had quite a collection by the time I was 12, but I lost interest in it and other interests took over like my Amiga, music and games. I felt pretty bad about it because I really enjoyed building, so I tried to come back to it a couple of times, but it didn’t feel the same anymore so I moved on.
Fast forward 23 years later, I all of a sudden felt the urge to do something with LEGO again. I work as a visual designer and I love toys and was thinking how I could create my own models and toys. Just do something else instead of design and 3D on screen… LEGO seemed perfect. I got extra motivated when I stumbled on some amazing work from a couple of builders on Flickr. Seeing stuff from Soren Roberts, Peter Reid, nnenn and Adrian Florea really gave me a good look of what you can do with the brick. These guys use parts in such a creative and different way and all have their own visual style. I had a lot of ideas, so I got my old collection from my parent’s attic and bought some new sets and just started.
More of our interview with Fredo after the jump: Continue reading
I feel like I should leave this one to Caylin, but I couldn’t pass up this adorable tugboat by Pierre E Fieschi when I ran across it on MicroBricks:
Though on a slightly different scale, Pierre’s recent supertanker is also lovely:
It’s the whimsical contrast between the parked cars and a creature of legend that I really like about this microscale block by Stefan (-2×4-).
I have a window office now, and if I looked out and saw a bloody great dragon peering down at me it would freak me the hell out.
This Mechagodzilla by Yasutaka (AIWSMOYA) takes me back to the monster movies and TV shows my brother and I grew up watching early on weekend mornings back in Japan.
The sculpting on Mechagodzilla’s head is particularly great, with nice use of cheese slopes and small wing plates.
This is also exactly the sort of LEGO creation we’d love to see tromping through a LEGO Tokyo for the Big in Japan display we’re planning for BrickCon 2010.
I like the apparent simplicity of the overall design of this microscale space station by Ludgonious, especially the transparent yellow windows at the top and the round protrusions toward the bottom. Lots of good detailing without being too cluttered. A good balance.
We feature a lot of LEGO microscale creations, but it seems like the huge stuff always gets the limelight. Sometimes, though, it’s not about how much LEGO you own, but how you use what you’ve got.
These little spaceships by Craig Lavergne (Tayasuune) aren’t built from very many pieces, but demonstrate originality of design and several interesting parts uses.
The red ship looks like it could do some serious damage if it rammed the fragile white ship with the gravity rings.
