Adela the mystique beauty

High heels, white evening gloves, a red corset with black laces, a dark red cushion and an intriguing posture… This must be the exact definition of a goddess. Eero Okkonen sculpted the most thrilling character out of a handful of bricks and we are left to admire his talent and her beauty.

Adela

Micro-scale LEGO SLS rocket is ready for NASA’s Next Giant Leap

NASA Engineer and LEGO fan Nicholas Mastramico has brought us a most excellent follow up to the shuttle, launch pad, and SLS rocket we featured last week. Nicholas’s microscale version is eye-catching with the great detail he’s packed into such a small model. What makes his version particularly special is his relationship with the rocket: Nicholas is a structural design engineer for NASA, and is currently working on the real SLS rocket.

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This means his micro-SLS has a unique opportunity to stand in the shadows of its ancestors, like the Saturn V rocket pictured here.

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Nicholas says he’s always been a huge sci-fi fan – but it was the early pictures of Mars from Sojourner that truly hooked him on space travel. He decided then he would build rockets for NASA one day, and that goal guided him through school to where he is now. He was recently involved in a test with a weather balloon, for which he provided a passenger. The experiment took the minifig up to 120,000 feet!

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There are more shots of some of the features of the mobile launch platform and payload capsules, as well as an itty-bitty adorable crawler!

Bringing Imperial order to the wretched hive of scum and villainy

Nikolai Mordan has built this awesome diorama of an Imperial base on Tatooine. It makes a fantastic backdrop for displaying LEGO’s UCS Imperial Shuttle, which looms ominously over the squads of stormtroopers and Imperial officers bringing the Imperial arm of order to the backwater oasis of Mos Eisley. I hope they find those droids they’re looking for.

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Nikolai built this as part of a collaboration displayed at Wintercon, a Latvian geek convention.

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LEGO Concorde cuts away from the runway as 65,000 bricks take flight

LEGO Certified Professional Ryan McNaught has been busy unveiling some fantastic new creations at Brickvention Australia. We showcased his incredible LEGO minifig-scale 120,000-brick sinking Titanic, and now we take to the skies with LEGO Concorde.

Ryan has chosen to build the iconic supersonic aircraft Concorde in miniland-scale. Building  Concorde in LEGO is cool, but it’s only when you see the other side of the build that the really impressive details emerge.

LEGO Concorde

While one side shows the complete aircraft, the other is an ingenious cutaway view that shows a slice through Concorde.

 

LEGO Concorde

At just over 4m long (over 13 feet) and some 65,000 bricks, Concorde took Ryan and his team 188 build hours to complete.  The cutaway view includes all sorts of great touches; the cockpit with knobs and switches, a galley area with croissant ready to serve, a jumble of luggage in the cargo hold and the inner workings of the landing gear.

LEGO Concorde

Check out the massive engines on this supersonic beast.

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I couldn’t spot any snakes on this plane…

What happens when Zeus gets into your LEGO

Dragons? Werewolves? Mermaids? Nope, the best mythological creature is obviously the minotaur (in my opinion, anyway). That may be why I had a soft spot for 70793 Skull Basher and why I love this “Cattle Devil” by LEGO 7.

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Parts use is great here: constraction armour pieces used to represent exactly that, wing pieces for the skirt, the bucket handle for a bottom pair of teeth and a lot more.

Also check out the weapon:

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100 years of Starbucks in LEGO

WingYew takes us time traveling in an unnamed city with a MOC that spans a hundred years, from the arrival of streetcars to the proliferation of megachains. The dueling coffeeshops are replete with excellently detailed interiors and give a striking sense of how little has changed – and exactly how much has changed.

LEGO MOC - Now and Then

MOC Starbucks (15)

LEGO MOC - Penang Heritage Shop

How the West was really won

Paddy Bricksplitter asserts, “Many historians state that the continued expansion of the western frontier was driven by two main factors . The Acquisition of land and the widespread domestication and utilization of Dinosaurs.” Who am I to question history? These gentlemen have tamed themselves a pair of velociraptors, hitched one to their buckboard, and are headed across the vast deserts for greener lands.

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The minifigs look to be amusing fellows, the buckboard itself is quite well-built, but it’s the placement of the whole scene on a brick-built base that sets apart this pseudo-historical vignette.

British Petrolheads

Joe Perez (mortalswordsman) works for Bright Bricks in the UK, where he builds LEGO models for a living. He is also a bit of a petrolhead; a British term for people who are crazy about internal combustion engines.

Gold rush by Joe Perez

This made him the perfect choice for a recent Bright Bricks project that involved building miniland scale (1/20) vehicles, including a fair few motorcycles. Despite building with LEGO for a living, he still finds the time and interest to build just for fun. He has obviously caught the bug of building motorcycles, as shown by his groovy chopper.

We can make this happen

Talking of petrolheads from the UK who are also professional LEGO builders, Carl Greatrix (bricktrix) launched a Lego Ideas project for a Caterham Seven model several months ago, which has now passed 10,000 votes. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for the design review.

The Blue Dragon Inn

This brightly colored Inn by Nick V (brickthing) is just packed full of detail. I can’t say I would have ever recognized it from it’s source material, but Nick’s description says it was inspired by a number of buildings from Asterix. I’ll take his word for it!