Made From Scratch?

Well, yes. Not with flour, eggs, and real chocolate chips, but with real LEGO bricks, and no instructions. This piece of LEGO art was inspired by an office party. We celebrated National Dessert Day, October 14th, at my office by everyone bringing in a batch of cookies. In addition to my wife’s scrumptious M & M cookies, I brought in this sculpture.

425° for 10 Minutes…

The most common question I was asked is, “how long did it take to build?” While I didn’t keep exact records, over the course of several evenings I spent a leisurely 4-6 hours. The upper end of that would probably include my failed first version that fell apart. My rebuild was much stronger. This final draft is completely solid and not held together by glue. I only had one little tan 1×2 on the front right corner of the bite that kept wanting to fall out.

And just to prove I didn’t cheat … here’s the flip-side. Look–it’s got chocolate chips, too! :)

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.

“I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white suits…” Back in 1966, the hit song “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” caused quite a ruckus, drawing protests from a variety of different groups. While I didn’t hit the scene for another 10 years, and wouldn’t discover the song until the early ’90’s as a Dr. Demento staple, I always found it very amusing. And maybe I’m just crazy, but it really is an innocent and funny song, right?

Anyhow, when I first saw the new minifig head above, it struck me pretty quick that it was a good epitome of the song. I went onto Bricklink as soon as possible and got ten. Which head? All of them … they’re all the same; the head is reversible. The sinister-serious expression on the one side, and the all-out let-me-get-out-of-this-mayhem scream on the other side.

To illustrate the head-reversal, let me show you this same vignette from behind. Equally as hilarious. Of course, here you’ll notice one of the tricks in getting all those “clean white suits” — popping out their arms and putting the front pattern on the back.

For more information about the song, check out the Wikipedia article. I did. :)

This MOC was inspired by my 6-year old son, who took a minifig head that had bright blue sunglasses and stuck it on the body of a storm trooper. I got a big kick out of it and got to thinking how funny it would be to put together an assortment of storm troopers with a variety of faces. And then I came up the slogan about the Empire being an EEOC afiliate. What better representation of big government than The Empire from the Star Wars saga. I thoroughly enjoyed putting this MOC together. It got tricky trying to figure out the right number of minifigs to use.

My first photo session had 6 or 7 more minifigs than this one, but it was way too crowded, and Darth Primate was over their heads. That left a lot of whitespace to the sides and detracted from the shot. But I really felt that he was necessary — I can’t remember anywhere else I’ve seen a 4-lightsaber wielding LEGO monkey, and that idea in itself was almost worth its own picture. On the other hand, I felt he fit right in as yet another species that the Empire wouldn’t discriminate against — especially since he hasn’t removed any of his own limbs flinging those 4 lightsabers around. :)

The wheelchair is largely based on one done by Brickshelf user mijasper. Again, while I may have seen someone give a monkey a lightsaber (though I can’t think of any examples right off), I’ve certainly not seen him pulling a General Grievous, and especially not with 4 dark side-colored red lightsabers. And, if you’re wondering, yes, that is a whip in the hand of the guy on the back-left — right actor, wrong movie, I guess. :) And the Imperial Guard is not other than a bespecktacled Harry Potter. I love the contrast of the old guy’s white beard along with his black pilot’s outfit — makes me wonder how hot it is in the helmet with all that beard stuffed in there. :) And I very much appreciate the LEGO Company diversifying it’s offerings of various flesh-colored minifigs over the last few years, particularly in the licensed sets. It’s helped spice up the variety. GO MINIMAN GO!

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. :)

Despite the fact that it was my 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.

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.

Note: 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. :)

Quick Facts:

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)

Do you remember, “A Different World” — that Cosby Show spinoff that ran in the late 80’s and early 90’s? There was an episode where one of the main characters Dwayne Wayne was talking about how he was going  to be a famous video game designer. The running gag throughout the episode was him appending part of the name, “Nintendo” to the end of someone’s name. So, the big video game he wanted to make was going to be called, “Dwayne-tendo.” And later in the episode he “complimented” Claire Huxtable by saying he would name a video game after her: Claire-tendo.

I saw this episode back at a time when my main aspiration in life was to become a video game designer. So, being the impressionable little guy I was, I came up with my own, similiary-inspired video game, but called it “Pretendo,” intended as a pun on “pretend” and, of course, “Nintendo.”

The key ideas behind the game were that it was going to have a very creative, imaginitive setting. The main character would be a boy around 13 or 14 who had a skate gun and a laser blaster. He would go around the game trying to stave off the monkey-bats. They were a pixelated version of those flying things the Wicked Witch of the West ordered around in the 1939 classic film version of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz.

I never did program the game, and I never planned out more than a few of the levels — all the paperwork for which has probably crumbled to dust in a landfill somewhere. But, I remember my initial character design for Bert pretty well, and having lately been thinking back to the days where side-scrollers were all the rage (they’re still my favorite type of video game), I sat down and snapped this rendition from memory. Okay, okay, he may not be as cool as a turtle-tossing plumber … wait … okay, so maybe a teenager with a skateboard and a laser blaster is pretty cool, after all. Well, I liked him. I’d say that deserves a trophy. Maybe a pizza trophy.

Anyhow, this bad boy measures in at 20″x30″ (64×96 LEGO pixels) and is comprised of eleven colors: black, light bluish grey, dark blue, dark bluish grey, dark pink, orange,  red, reddish brown, sand green, tan, and yellow.

I found a decent picture on Wookiepedia to use as a reference starting point. I loved the characteristic Darth Maul snarl and figured it would make for a good portrait. Darth Maul’s distinct and easily recognizable facial markings also make for good subject matter — especially when the primary colors of the makeup are two of the five basic colors of LEGO: red and black (the others being blue, yellow, and white). The background in the reference picture was pretty blank so I used tan and grey to be reminiscent of Tatooine, where the Sith Apprentice first reveals himself to Obi Wan and Qui-Gon Jinn. I like the horizontal ue of grey bringing out the perpindicular affect against Darth Maul’s Vertical stance. He appears momentarily still, willing for the publicity shot the paparazzi is pulling, but ready to bite off his lens cap.

Posing with the Boys

It may be hard to tell, but I asked the boys to give me their scariest “Darth Maul” looks. May be hard to do wearing Curious George T-Shirts, I dunno. But they enjoyed themselves. It didn’t take a lot of prodding to get the two of them to pose alongside daddy’s latest LEGO portait mosaic. They’ve been very eager the last couple of days while I worked on it, “Daddy, can I see Darth Maul?”

This photo was actually the first I took. Christopher was giving a small snarl, but Patrick is demonstrating his natural ability to be facially expressive. For all the extreme expressions he gives us at times, it makes me wonder if a face can be double-jointed.

Note: Darth Maul and Star Wars are registered trademarks and copyrighted things belonging to George Lucas. No infringement is intended by me on these copyrights; I am simply demonstrating an example from my personal collection that I have made with LEGO bricks. Much as a writer of an magazine article would paraphrase a line from a book and state that he was making such a paraphrase, so I am “paraphrasing” the essence of George Lucas’s work via the medium of LEGO, rather than the written word. :)

Perhaps the delivery folks are supposed camouflage packages? Make it look like they’re not really there so my neighbor doesn’t steal it before I can get to it? Or maybe tossing the Welcome Mat is an effort to help the package not blow away?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not mad. Mildly perplexed, maybe. Somewhat amused. Maybe. I do appreciate the folks that deliver my mail and packages … I just don’t expect the creativity when it comes to delivering them. And, so long as this is the extreme of the creativity, and we can get back to some normalcy, soon, i.e., just put it behind the door!