I can’t take all the credit for the work involved in this one.  There are 9 32 x 32 stud plates (which makes this 30 inches by 30 inches!) that I divvied up to the 9 kids in my class this year.  I used software to break a standard image down to 96 x 96 pixels.  Each pixel then corresponds to 1 lego stud, of which there are 9,216.  I then took an output of colors in each of the 96 rows and imported them into Excel, where I could manipulate cell sizes to match up to 32 x 32 cells per sheet.  Each student just had a print off to work from and mark which studs they filled.  The print outs were just black and white, so they had no idea what they were making.  I really liked the concept of using excel as instructions to make large scale mosaics, so I’ll definitely keep that in my bag of tricks for future works.

There are about 5,000 pieces in the mosaic.  The kids had no idea what they were building collectively until the center plate was done and put next to 2 other finished plates.  I did end up having to throw in a bit of time since 2 kids missed class and I wanted to make sure they would be able to finish it in the last class.  Total labor hours is somewhere in the 20+ hour range.

click on the images for larger views. 

This was part of a challenge this year to make something homemade for 5 people.  Adam’s always been a big Who fan.  Probably took 3 hours to design, build, and then glue.

I once set out to create a model of Pittsburgh out of bricks.  It didn’t turn out well.  Scale is a hard thing to maintain when constricted to the shapes of LEGO bricks.  So, the mini-series was born.  As I’m inspired, or as requested, I’ll set out to recreate individual buildings and landmarks.  Here’s what I got so far:

The Civic Arena:

The US Steel Tower:

The Cathedral of Learning:

I’ll probably set out to create a “larger scale” version of the cathedral of learning, but I just couldn’t resist this one.

You knew someone was going to do it eventually.  Back in 2009, British Television host, James May, and a group of volunteers set out to create the house in the UK.  Sure, they made sure it had a solid wood frame structure, but everything else is all LEGO.  There was something about James actually living in the LEGO house for a couple days, but I’m not sure that really happened.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1203654/Thousands-Top-Gears-James-May-helping-hand-Lego-brick-house.html

http://www.geeksugar.com/House-Being-Built-Entirely-Out-Legos-Wood-UK-4389253

http://www.jamesmaystoystories.com/

This is actually my second foray into the LEGO mosaic realm. The first one was a freehand design of the LEGO logo. A mosaic of Albert Einstein would require a little assistance though.

There are 2 methods for creating mosaics in LEGO bricks, this one is a studs out technique, where the studs face the viewer. It’s probably the easiest to do, because you can match up 1×1 bricks with a square pixel of an image. The other methods is the studs up technique, which involves stacking the plates or bricks vertically. With that method, you lose the ease in design, but you gain the opportunity for resolution since the profile of a plate is 2:5.

For this Albert Einstein design, I knew I wanted to keep it smaller scale. 32×48 studs looked like a nice portrait size and i had 3 16×32 base plates as a great canvas to begin. I took the image, cropped it down to the correct ratio, and then decreased the size down to something I could translate into block. If you just shrink it to 32×48 pixels…well, let’s just say it doesn’t resemble Albert Einstein anymore.

So, after 5 hours of adjusting blocks and trying to get it to resemble the picture, we have this:

I think I might have an easily producible art here, that I’m thinking of entertaining commissioned mosaics if I were to be approached.

Here’s the LEGO logo mosaic, if you were curious:

Nathan Sawaya, known as the brick artist, is my favorite LEGO artist around.  He mixes brick with modern art sculpture.  His latest project is Hugman, where he leaves a LEGO man hugging random urban objects.  Kind of a viral marketing technique, kind of a Banksy method, but still entertaining and unique in it’s own way.  His sculptures are on a gallery tour, so if they’re in your area, check him out!

Check out more on google images.

So this is a MOC (My Own Creation) that I did a year or so ago in a similar design, but never documented it. I’m a lot happier with the lower profile of this incarnation over the boxier first version I did.

My initial intent was just to test my abilities with gears and the technics set. I was going to set out making some sort of car, I knew, but I wanted to use my battery pack to make it either be remote controlled or at least self propelled. As it turns out, my LEGO motor no longer works, and I have no idea why, and it seems most battery sticks from the early 90′s, like mine, no longer work. So that already discouraged me from doing what I wanted to do. The next obstacle was having enough “sticks” that were long enough. I wanted to create something like a racecar framework, but I didn’t have the joints and pieces for that. Lastly, I have a ton of gears, but i have no more rubber-bands that would look awesome in a car, so I had to use gears instead of the pulley wheel designs.

All told, I like how the tractor turned out. The mower deck is a little lame, I know, but it was something simple to throw together and use the trailer hitch. The front loader functionality worked better in my original iteration, because the bucket doesn’t quite tilt back all the way, but it would just need a little more tweaking to fix, and I figured I spend enough time on this already.

and a video to show you all the movable parts (hood, steering wheel, engine piston, mower deck, and front loader):

I realize that I won’t be able to blog frequently on my own LEGO creations, so I’ll showcase the works of other people as well. This one was displayed at Brickfest by Suzanne Rich

When I first brought my LEGO collection from my mom’s house to my house, I created a large scale LEGO man.  It was a little smaller, didn’t have moving arms, it had a baseball hat, and it had a double pocket torso, but it was very similar to this one.

I had a few difficulties finding enough blue pieces to get this done.  I made 3 special orders on bricklink to get more 1×4 bricks, slopes, and also peg and hole joint piece to let the arms and legs move.  Everything else was already in my inventory.

It probably took me 10 hours including rebuilding hours.  It’s pretty heavy, even though each section is pretty hollow.  It’s crazy how fast weight and pieces used add up with LEGO creations.

more pictures here.

THE END

I was inspired to recreate the Pittsburgh Penguins logo in LEGO bricks on Sunday.

It took about 2.5 hours from start to finish.  I started off with just making the yellow triangle in the back to figure out what scale I would be able to achieve with the pieces I have.  I knew I wanted to make it a little more 3D, so I started with the white belly next making some 2×4 white pieces stick out so that they would lend to the structural integrity of the hockey stick.

Here’s the original logo that I used to replicate:

You can see that there’s no good way to duplicate those gloves, so I just made a few phalanges-like collections surrounding the stick.

For a quick turn around, I’m happy with it.  There are a few things that I could easily do to improve it, but I’m just starting out to get an idea of where my strengths are naturally and what I will need to work on.

You can watch my flickr feed for more pictures and updates – www.flickr.com/photos/sixf00t4/sets/72157624043323210/