DuckJournal Magazine: For LEGO Duck enthusiasts everywhere!

All good AFOLs (Adult fans of LEGO) know about BrickJournal magazine. After I built my Mime Magazine mosaic, I started brainstorming about other magazine titles that would be fun to cover as LEGO. BrickJournal seemed to be an obvious choice, and mixing it up with a Duck followed pretty quickly.

It’s not always easy to get an idea of the size of LEGO mosaics when all I do is include a photo of just the mosaic, so I got a little help from some of the little girls in my life (above) to give you a better idea.

Here is DuckJournal on display with my Mime Magazine mosaic at BrickWorld 2011:

Building a LEGO magazine cover

Mime Magazine is the first in a series of 3 LEGO mosaics I built and displayed for BrickMagic 2011. Each of the 3 mosaics is a parody of a popular magazine. Playing on the popularity of the new LEGO Mime minifig, I thought it appropriate to announce a “Mime of the Year” in Mime magazine, complete with the red-bordered representation of the original magazine, Time.

Facts about LEGO Mime Magazine

Built: February 2011
Size: 35″ x 45″
5 Colors: Black, Red, White, Lt. Grey (Bley), Dk. Grey (Bley)
4500 pieces

The HTML 5 Logo (Grayscale) built with LEGO bricks

The specification for HTML is one of those rare things that is the successful result of being run by committee. Or two. Considering the tens of thousands (if not millions) of HTML coders worldwide, we accept that a committee (or two) is superior than a democracy.

But, as something being run by a committee (or two), we still get iffy things like the occurrence this week of the announcement of a logo for the up and coming HTML 5 standard as well as another announcement that HTML 5 will not be known as such, but as simply HTML, which completely obliterates the logo.

But, since the whole thing is still run by a committee (or two), it is not clear at this time with the life and/or death of the HTML 5 logo will be.

In the meantime, fresh after the first announcement, I commenced upon my own personal interpretation of the logo in LEGO bricks. And post it here for posterity, regardless of the outcome.

The HTML 5 Logo (Grayscale) built with LEGO bricks with Builder and Builder Jr.

The Duckingham Logo, a LEGO portrait

Okay, so I’ve built the Duckingham Logo out of LEGO before. But that one only fit on one large grey baseplate — measured at 15″x15″. I wanted something bigger for BrickMagic.

So I went a size up—used 4 green baseplates, so I’m measuring 20″x20″ for this one. I was very satisfied at the improved resolution.

Would you believe I spent Thursday evening before BrickMagic putting this one together? That would explain why I was so tired that morning…;)

There are 731 LEGO bricks in the mosaic: 46 pink, 303 blue, and 382 white.

I discovered that having all that white in there makes it really tricky to get a decent photo. So I had to add some props into the background. Here are a couple more shots. Tried to give a close up perspective in the first one, and then an angled shot in the next.

For St. Patrick’s day I wanted to do something green, but a little out-of-the-ordinary. This mosaic is based on the cover of one of our favorite books for kids, Can You Hop? written by Lisa Lawston and illustrated by Ed Vere. I love Ed’s simple style and Lisa’s elegant little story. Unfortunately the book is out of print right now, but you might find a copy at your local library. When I checked there were also some acceptable used copies listed on Amazon.

This one the boys actually helped a lot on. I mapped out the dimensions of the frog, and filled in his outlines. Then the boys filled in the rest of the colors with a little help from mom & dad.

I’ve not seen the musical Wicked , but when I saw a poster recently I was struck at the similarity of the green on the poster and LEGO’s shade of lime green. And it seemed that the Ides of March was a good day to post something “wicked.” So, here is a bit of an iconic stylization of part of the poster. I think Wicked and Broadway fans will find it recognizable. By the way, you may notice I’m on a bit of a “green kick.” Two weeks ago it was Green Eggs and Ham, and I’ve got another “green” mosaic to post on Tuesday (appropriate for St. Patrick’s day).

Note: The Musical, Wicked is based on Gregory Maguire’s New York Times Best Selling Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, giving more back story to the whole Oz thing and telling you what “really” happened, according to the author. As a NYT Best Seller I would caution that the book is not suitable for and not intended for children.

This symbol appears ubiquitously on the world wide web. It’s supposed to be an easy concept, but for many, “really simple syndication” may seem not so simple. Most explanations that I read when I was first getting my feet wet in the concept made it sound a lot more difficult than it really needs to be.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why turn it into LEGO art?

Why not? Some days I want to tackle complex portrait mosaics, other days I want something simple and straightforward.  While surveying my site recently, it occurred to me that the little image I have sitting there would be a fun thing to convert into a mosaic. I spent a few minutes in Photoshop and a few minutes in PicToBrick, and then about a half hour bricking grey, pink, and orange to a 10″x10″ baseplate, and voila! –a recreation of a standard RSS symbol.

What is RSS, anyhow?

RSS is a system created to make spreading and receiving news or other data much more efficiently. Most news sites, blogs, and other types of websites that have regularly posted content make use of some sort of news feed like RSS. An RSS feed is a list of items that a website is currently publishing. The website owner or content provider posts his news article to his site, which then (behind the scenes) converts that article into a data stream called an RSS and saves a copy of it on the website.

How can I get an RSS feed?

You can subscribe to an RSS feed using a number of different methods. I use Google Reader for all my news feeds. I read a number of blogs on topics ranging from LEGO news to website development to personal management to family and friends. But, rather than having to remember to go visit each of these sites every day or every week to see if they have any updates, when you subscribe to a feed, your reader will let you know which sites have been updated since the last time you checked.

Or, if you’d rather clutter up your inbox, you can subsribe to an RSS feed by email.

Other News Feeds

There are other types of feeds out there as well, like Atom News Feed. It was developed to improve on a lot of the shortcomings of RSS, but will probably have a hard time doing that because of the extremely widespread use of RSS.

Getting back to this particular mosaic was great because I was able to accomplish a couple goals: 1) I wanted to get back to doing a portrait of a live person, since my last couple have been movie/television characters, 2) I wanted to get another done in my series of personal family members, and 3) I wanted to try out a relatively small sized mosaic.

Don’t get me wrong — I thoroughly enjoyed making Darth Maul as well as Bob & Larry, but there’s a sense where those are the easier types of mosaics to do — they make use of very distinct, basic colors. The red and black color schem of Darth Maul creates an easier contrast to portray in plastic brick than flesh tones, but I think this one turned out very nice.

And the other main challenge here was to get a nice looking mosaic from a small base, in this case 15″x20″. That means 48 studs by 64 studs. The key is to zoom in close enough to the face that you can recognize the face, but not so close in that the whole mosaic is nose.

A Few Quick Facts:

Size: 30″ x 30″

Pieces used: 4,212 (1×1′s, 1×2′s, 1×3′s, 1×4′s, 1×6′s, 1×8′s, 2×2′s, 2×3′s, 2×4′s)

Colors used: 15  (Black, Blue, Brown, Dark Blue, Dark Grey (dk. bley), Lime, Light Blue, Green, Light Grey (lt. bley), Orange, Pink, Red, Tan, White, Yellow)

The inspiration for this portrait mosaic

After the great way my Duckingham cartoon character turned out in a previous post, I wanted to do another, just for fun. The boys have watched Jonah 3 or 4 times in the last week, and Patrick keeps asking to see it again.

As far as the image above goes, despite the fact that it was the boys who asked me to do this portrait of two of their favorite TV stars, and also despite the fact that I originally took pictures of the boys on either side of this picture, when Kristina wandered over to see what we were doing, she made a much better pose. Perhaps the boys were still stuck on needing to growl for the Darth Maul picture a couple weeks ago? I dunno. Just that they wouldn’t pose nicely. So,  Kristina (and Snoopy) get their five minutes of fame.

Disclaimer

Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber are owned by Big Idea. No infringement is intended; I am simply posting photos of personal artwork I created using LEGO bricks. I am a big fan of Big Idea’s work and glad to put in a plug for them.