Tag Archives: Nativity

Bearing gifts, we traverse afar

Many of us know the story of the birth of Jesus. We’ve seen the Nativity scene possibly hundreds of times in our lives, whether it be in storybook illustrations, our own simple scene set up on a fireplace mantle, or an elaborate life-sized diorama adorned in lights. As familiar as this may be to some of us, we still get a kick out of it when someone does the scene justice in LEGO. This year a builder by the name of byMartin dazzles us with this well-detailed rendition featuring The Three Wisemen bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the newborn king. I’m particularly loving the thatched roof of the manger cleverly constructed from tan Technic pins. This scene truly takes us back to over two-thousand years in Bethlehem. I can just about hear the camels braying and the sand rustling gently under their feet.

2020 Nativity

Regardless of which religion you may or may not follow, it is nice to be reminded occasionally that goodwill towards others is an important and beautiful thing. From all of us here at The Brothers Brick, we hope you have a joyous holiday season and a festive and fruitful new year.

One night in Bethlehem

In my humble opinion, the variety of nativity scenes makes them a whole world of their own in terms of art motifs. With all the possibilities open, I still decided to go for a very classic approach with mine, both in terms of imagery and building style. It has actually been on my to-build list for ten years, which is from before I even knew about the online LEGO community. Primarily this was a build for myself and my family to put under our Christmas tree, but there is also no harm in sharing it.

Nativity main

The construction is pretty basic with a generic stone wall and some layers of ground on the base, but there are still a few fun techniques that I have tried. The first one being 1×2 tiles connected to upside-down plates with minifig hands, which makes for some neat offsets and the texture you see. The downside of this technique is basically the same as with all of my other ones, that being its terrible fragility. There are ways of improving on it, but that is something for the future. The second technique is a bush/tree using a six stem flower stem piece as the basis and plates around it. I was inspired by a builder whose name I can not recall for the foliage, but when I find him again I will update the photo description on my Flickr.