Tag Archives: -soccerkid6

Have a cup of joe at this down-to-earth coffee house

This LEGO coffee house build comes to us from Isaac Snyder for this year’s Eurobricks event. The task? Building a house with significance to the builder. In this case, Isaac draws inspiration from a local coffee shop. Let’s take a closer look at the house, starting with the outdoor furniture. Check out the chairs with the tables! Some nice usage of brackets for the chairs’ seats and back, paired nicely with those plates with shafts. That’s something I really adore with builds of this scale–the parts usage ends up being really creative to imply/represent what the builder wants for the model. There are more techniques at work here too, like the brickwork. Using those half curved 1×1 tiles throughout the textured and plain bricks gives more depth and shaping to what would be flat walls otherwise. Excellent build all around from mine eyes.

Terra Cotta Coffee House

Bridging the past and the present with a royal redesign

Builder -soccerkid6 goes to the drawing board with this new vision of the classic LEGO Castle set 6078 Royal Drawbridge. The original set is from year 1995 and features a bridge that’s less draw and more sneaky. It could drop anyone on it into the water around it–it’s a trap! Of course, being a set from 1995, the details are rather sparse with limited parts in existence at the time. This redesign, on the other hand, is rich with details and parts. First, the drawbridge is the spitting image of what we expect a drawbridge to look like, complete with the chains. The towering battlements are fuller now, featuring lovely detailing in the exposed brick textures of the walls. The spires are stronger with the blue drill pieces for the points, but my favorite little touch in the whole build is the inclusion of flowers with the greenery.

6078 Royal Drawbridge Revamp

This bowed ship cuts through space like an arrow

Another SHIPtember LEGO spaceship blasts its way through space! The bows from the Horizon game series serves as -soccerkid6‘s inspiration for this piercing craft. It comes in at 104 studs in length (or should we say height?) and weighs just over 3 pounds—the weight of such fine design! It’s nearly impossible to miss the bow influence in the design with the bend and curving bits at the top and bottom. Where an arrow could nock on a bow rests the central engine and the pointing bridge, giving a clue that it’s a microscale ship. I like the color choices of the build, with that yellow drawing you in to the middle with the teal highlights to balance it all out. The details of the ship stand out and work well together, allowing us to fully appreciate the look and feel of the clever craft.

Project Azarel

Cute forest animals abound at the Everdell Castle

I love how hobbies or interests are able to bring people together. I am quite the LEGO nerd and thanks to LEGO and its community, I’ve met so many lovely people. My partner on the other hand is quite the board game geek and thanks to him I got sucked into the community that comes with the dice. What never stops to amaze me is the amount of love that goes into designing board games. John Snyder and Isaac Snyder drew inspiration from the game ‘Everdell’. The game is filled with cute forest critters and almost magical surroundings. For their latest build, they decided to give the ‘Castle’ card the LEGO treatment.

Everdell Castle

The castle wall looks really organic and irregular at the top due to a fine selection of pieces. We can find dinosaur tails, spider legs and plant limbs used for the wooden castle gate. Each wooden beam gets adorned with a white horn, claw, cone, lever base, or a bulb to represent fresh snow. The main tower has a crazy angle to it and I can’t figure out how the bricks are connected at the place of the angle. My guess is flex tubing but I might be wrong. It may as well be friction and gravity. There are cattle horns used in brown as architectural details. We get flags made out of pentagonal tiles with a little crown attached to it with a rubber band, which looks like a little layer of fresh snow on the top of the flag. The inhabitants of the castle are LEGO animals, which makes this build less than minifigure scale, which allows for parts to be used in a very original way. The skis used for doors look massive and add a sense of grandeur to the castle. Have you spotted the brave little blue hamster defending the castle?

Coming Soon

Battle cruiser ready for deployment

With the end of September comes the completed SHIPtember LEGO models created by expert builders from around the world. Builder Isaac Snyder is one of those, who shared his battle cruiser with The Brothers Brick.

Comierre Battle Cruiser

The Commiere Battle Cruiser is ready for battle. In fact, it’s fresh out of the drydock, built during the annual SHIPtember event. This model has a ton of repeated parts but it’s built in a way that doesn’t give off repetition. I love the use of tan, orange, and dark sand-green. These colors contrast so well with the dark grey, especially around the engines.

Comierre Battle Cruiser

I’m also impressed at the pieces used that aren’t just standard bricks. The engines, for example, are made in part of brown Bionicle torsos. The pointed orange pieces in between the dark sand-green are feet from the Hero Factory figures. It’s a true SHIPtember starship!

The elephant and the mouse

Brick building animals in minifigure scale can be quite a challenge, but Isaac Snyder has risen to the occasion with a brick built elephant to go along with the official LEGO mouse. These cuties are called Olli and Rolli, with Olli being the elephant. There are loads of tales and fables about elephants and mice. In some they are enemies, in others they are friends, I even read one where the mouse kills the elephant because it keeps stepping on its nest. These two however seem to be best friends. Although Olli’s legs aren’t poseable he looks like he is going places. The best part about Olli has to be his feet. The truncated cone actually looks like it was designed to be an elephants foot. With the stud holes functioning as the nails. Olli’s ears and trunk are poseable which allows for a lot of great expressions to be made. And the eyes could be switched with LEGO’s ever-expanding collection of eyes printed on 1×1 round plates.

Olli and Rolli

Load up and roll out

There’s always a ton of cool builds that show up in February thanks to various “Febrover” contests. This year was no different with Isaac Snyder’s (on Flickr as -soccerkid6) M-Tron rover and loading station.
M-Tron Loading Station

First off, so many shields! It’s incredible to see so many of one piece used so well. The shield shape gives the base of this build a concrete look, very fitting for space-corporation LEGO design. I’m also a huge fan of the use of ladders as the frame. It feels like this whole build was taken right out of an industrial outpost controlled by M-Tron.
Astral Gatherer

But the rover is the real star of the show. The wheels were installed backward so Isaac could use the grey disk as a detail effect, which is very clever. I totally dig the mini-crane on the back as well, with again a ladder being used, this time as the crane arm.

M-Tron should really make a comeback. If it does, I hope it looks like Isaac’s stuff!