Bill Ward’s Brickpile

A couple of weeks ago, I was a guest speaker at Cypress High School in Santa Cruz, CA. A friend of mine is a math teacher there and she invited me in to give a LEGO presentation. I decided to focus my talk on the art of lettering in LEGO, so I brought along my LOVE and LEGO Robert Indiana style sculptures, and the Blackburn Hotel. I also built some lettering out of LEGO parts as a study of different ways to model the alphabet. I came up with a set of five clear baseplates with the letters A through Z, each letter in a different style:

I also made some more basic lettering examples. The students then had about 15 minutes (I meant to give them more time, but between my rambling on, and their incessant questions, the presentation part took a lot longer than planned) to play with some bulk LEGO that I had brought, to try to build their names or other text… Here’s some of what they came up with:

The slides from the Half-Plate Offsets presentation I gave at BrickCon are now available online. The slides are freely available and redistributable using a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license.

Download here: half-plate.pdf

I took video of the presentation, but I haven’t watched it yet. If it comes out well, I’ll post it online also.