Price - Low to High Price - High to LowThe stern scowl and helmet of Judge Dredd is an instantly recognizable combination, and Grantmasters has captured it well in this flat build inspired by the portraits of Chris McVeigh. This build makes great use of the space with the background behind Dredd simulating the sprawling, dense city in the film. And the use of gold LEGO wings to simulate the pauldron is a master stroke. I am the law!Tell all your friends! I spent many hours as a kid playing 1994’s amazing vertical scrolling flight shooter Raptor: Call of the Shadows on MS-DOS, so I instantly recognized this scene by Havoc. It’s a brilliant game for its age, with an upgradeable ship and damage that has to be repaired between missions. I love that Havoc has built the entire interface into the model, including the health bar on the right side, and that explosion which looks perfectly retro. I hadn’t thought about this game in 20 years, but I decided to look it up again after seeing this fantastic creation and was elated—and more than a bit surprised—to discover it’s not only available on Steam but can be played for free in a browser.
Guess what I just spent the last half hour doing? Finally, builder Havoc has even recreated the pixel art from the cover. Everything I know about expensive sports cars can fit into a single Duplo treasure chest (with a bit of room to spare). But I can appreciate the beauty of these two Ferraris, especially since they have been transformed into stunning LEGO mosaics by Ryan Link. The mosaic above features the Enzo Ferrari and is 60 studs wide and 27 bricks tall, while the mosaic below is the Ferrari 625 TRC which is 50 studs wide and 16 bricks tall. Ryan used a “studs not on top” (SNOT) building technique with both horizontal and vertical plates to achieve these high-resolution mosaics. The end result is so beautiful that I may become a classic sports car fan after all (Just don’t try to make me drive stick shift). This LEGO mosaic by Joe Perez features a fiery sunset behind the Statue of Liberty in sharp silhouette, combining standard mosaic techniques for the sunset with sculptural techniques for Lady Liberty.
Joe says he created the sculpture based on a photo he took in New York on his honeymoon. Last month we featured an impressive Lite Brite-style LEGO creation by British builder Jonathan Gale. Apparently that build was just the beginning of Gale’s lightsaber balancing escapades. Like Picasso, Gale won’t be satisfied to leave this building style behind until he’s mastered it. So far, he has experimented with both hexagonal and grid-based light-saber arrangements. His most recent build uses 2695 lightsaber blades to create the iconic LEGO logo. This LEGO portrait of Frankenstein’s monster by David Alexander Smith employs a nifty negative-space technique to create a classic movie-poster feel. The lurching lines lend an air of misshapen monstrosity to the face, and the monotone palette imitates the harsh lighting of ancient horror flicks. This pixilated classic space logo by Jonathan Gale is one of the most impressive LEGO creations I have seen in a long time. If you look closely, you’ll see that his build is made up of thousands of LEGO lightsaber blades (5520 of them to be exact).
There is an LED light behind the blades, giving the translucent pieces a glowing effect. Jonathan said he was inspired to try this building technique after a LUG meeting where he realized that 25 LEGO lightsaber blades fit perfectly into a 2×2 stud square. This build took over 10 hours to complete and, according to the builder, came with a constant and serious risk of collapse. I can’t even imagine the amount of patience it took Jonathan to complete this beast. While I have not yet played this particular title in the Legend of Zelda series, the LEGO mosaic version of Link in wall merged form built by Hans Demol is instantly recognizable. In game, Link can take the form of a wall painting to traverse the worlds and puzzles in interesting ways, and Hans shows this with a stacked plates mosaic style that works well for both the painted Link and the uneven brick wall texture. In this close-up of Link’s face, you can see several different colors used to achieve the painted look.
Kids, the key to a really great photo-realistic mosaic is to build big, using simple colors. Oh, and make sure you choose an extremely cool character. Let me tell you, nobody is cooler than Sir Michael Caine. If you only know him as Alfred in the Nolan Batman trilogy, or as Austin Powers’ “fahjah,” you are missing out on one of the hippest cats in the history of British cinema. David Hughes has captured an iconic photograph from 1965, 5 years before Caine finally quit smoking. Nostalgic for the “gabber” electronic dance music scene of 1990’s Netherlands, Dutch builder Chris van Vliet built this amazing three-dimensional LEGO recreation the Masters of Hardcore logo (a record label and series of EDM festivals). The sculpture – which resembles the giant goat skull that used to grace the stage at these events – is comprised almost entirely of LEGO bricks kept from that era, and has even been beautifully black-lit. Chris also gives us a couple of extra treats in the form of detailed work in progress photos showing how the entire creation came together, and a short video of two brick-built gabber fans in action!
And not satisfied with recreating just one gabber-era logo, Chris even produced this sculpture of the Thunderdome “Thunder Wizzard” logo, which when you compare it to the original is clearly spot on! In computer graphics, a sprite is an image that represents a discrete element. Sprites are sorta like cels from animation: and some older video games swapped out sprites to simulate animation. One such game was the Super Nintendo classic The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In a way, the pixels in a sprite are like the 1×1 elements in a LEGO mosaic. Genius idea: build sprites with LEGO! My sprites are 3 plates tall, and don’t require baseplates. Here’s our hero Link, lifting the Master Sword. Finding sprite sheets (grids of sprites in a single file, used for animation) on the internet to reference was easy. Finding 1×1 plates in the right colors was hard. Believe it or not, LEGO doesn’t make 1×1 plates in every color. Building Princess Zelda and Ganon was almost as difficult as beating the game.