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.

human knowledge belongs to the world.

You’re ridiculous if you claim your knowledge is your own.  There is so much that contributes to your knowledge that you’re taking for granted.  Also, if you keep your knowledge to yourself, you’re also preventing someone else from doing something else with it.  Maybe even making it better.

How much surface area would it take to create the tallest mountain manually?  I think this would be a good task for some place in Colorado, since they’re already so elevated.  You could build this mountain and design it to have a wide road that wraps around it, and depending how long it turns out to be, you could have marathons, sky gliding, street luge competitions, or even some crazy sort of triathalon where you run to it, bike up it, and repel down it.  You could create tourist pull overs and places to eat and check out the view.  We’re totally covering some dangerous ground close to the Tower of Babel, but we’ve go the technology and big trucks these days!  We could have it done in a matter of weeks!  Heck, while we’re at it, we might even end up creating the deepest hole just by digging out the dirt needed!  BONUS!

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:

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.

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