Bill – Page 84 – Bill Ward's Brickpile

Damaged in Transit

As you may recall, while we were back east for BrickFest I bought a bunch of LEGO and built two new models, the Scarlet Mayhem spaceship and Garden Gnome sculpture.Well it turns out I bought a lot of LEGO. Way too much in fact. So much that I had to buy a 5-piece luggage set (3 suitcases, a handbag, and a toiletries bag) and all 3 suitcases were basically packed full of LEGO.

The current air travel rules allow each person to have up to four bags: two pieces of checked luggage, a carryon, and a “personal item.” With the new bags full of LEGO, Holly and I were right at that limit. And all the bags were packed quite full.

As a result there really wasn’t any way to give my MOC’s adequate padding to keep them from being destroyed. I was able to put them in plastic bags so that the damaged bits would at least stay together. The photos you see here are the result. Although it looks really bad (and in fact, the gnome was even worse – I snapped the picture about halfway through putting him back together), it actually wasn’t very hard to rebuild them by consulting the photos I had taken, so I was able to rebuild both models in fairly short order. I plan to bring them both to the next BayLUG meeting (assuming I don’t go to Northwest BrickCon instead, which is still a possibility).[tags]lego[/tags]

BayLUG “Downtown” display at LEGO store

On Wednesday night, I got together with a few other membes of the Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group (BayLUG) to set up a new display at the LEGO store in Valley Fair Mall, Santa Clara, CA. My contributions included the buildings (blue office building and Quik-E-Mart), the cars on the street, and the traffic signals. Charles and Adrienne built the subway and sewer module specifically for this exhibit. Bruce brought a helicopter (based on one from the Batman sets) and a trolley based on a design by James Mathis. Russell provided the street details such as streetlights, mailboxes, fire hydrant, etc. Detailed photos are available on Flickr, or check out the slide show.

You can see more similar models at our exhibit at the Great Train Expo this weekend in San Jose (at the fairgrounds).
[tags]lego,city,downtown[/tags]

Dragostea din Tei in LEGO??

The song “Dragostea din Tei” by the Moldovan band O-Zone, more widely known as “the Numa Numa song,” is probably the most widely recognized song in the Romanian language ever written. And now it has finally been done in LEGO! Do you remember Gary Brolsma’s famous “Numa Numa Dance” video? This LEGO animation is a remake of that dance using a LEGO minifig. The minifig’s mouth has been animated and the arms move in ways that LEGO just can’t do, unless you rip them off at the shoulders!! Muahahahahaha!!!! (sorry, lost control there for a moment). Anyway, here’s the video (Update 12/23/2008: The original video has been removed from YouTube, but I found another copy and have replaced the embedded video here):

The original Gary Brolsma version, to refresh your memory (or if you’ve been living under a rock somewhere and never saw it):

For more about the song, check out the Wikipedia entries for “Dragostea din Tei” and “Numa Numa.” And for more about Gary Brolsma, check out his fan site or his latest work, NewNuma.

Via The Brothers Brick.

Garden Gnome Sculpture

My first sculpture in over two years is the Garden Gnome. This enigmatic figure watches over your garden and makes sure everything is in order. Along with Scarlet Mayhem, this was built from my “east coast collection” during my trip for BrickFest. Detailed photos are available on Flickr, or check out the slide show.

I built the gnome using parts from 3 sets of the LEGO Special Edition tub 6092 which I bought at BrickFest. I bought those sets largely for the red tubs, which use the same lids and are exactly 2/3 the height of the blue tubs from the set that got me into LEGO sculpture, 3033, from a few years ago. Ah, I miss that set…

For more of my sculpture work, check the section of this site and the Sculpture collection on Flickr.

This sculpture, like all the ones I did before (except Maneki Neko) is done entirely with regular LEGO bricks. No SNOT, no unusual shapes, not even any plates. (Maneki Neko has plates in the Japanese coin and SNOT in the claws.) Should I go for more detail by using such parts or stick with basic bricks? Let me know (by posting a comment) what you think.

Update: Photos are now also on Brickshelf, and I posted about this on lugnet.build.sculpture.
[tags]lego,sculpture,garden,gnome,gardengnome[/tags]

Best of BrickFest 2006

I’ve finally had a chance to go over all the photos I previously posted from BrickFest, and selected what I feel are the best. Some are great photos, while others are photos of great things. Still others are just photos of things that are quintsentially BrickFest. Click the picture to the right to view the 79 pictures I selected, or go straight to a slide show.

I also added tags and titles to all the photos I had uploaded, and deleted a few that were redundant or out of focus. If you would like to see all the pictures, click these links:

[tags]lego, brickfest, brickfest2006[/tags]

Scarlet Mayhem

Studless, smooth, and sleek, this racer, known as “Scarlet Mayhem,” was the winner of the first annual Earth to Mars race, which tests a ship’s performance in atmosphere, interplanetary, and reentry situations. The two-man crew take turns flying the craft, similar to the Le Mans car race. Detailed photos are available on Flickr.

The scoops on the tops of the wings provide air for the engines when running inside the atmosphere in scramjet mode. It has a lot of SNOT details – the bottom of the fuselage is mounted studs-down, and covered in tiles and slopes so that no studs or undersides of bricks are showing. The wings are studs-out, made of bricks, and the only conventional part of the ship is the wingtips which do show their undersides. Because of the studs-down bottom, there are no studs inside on the floor for the minifigs to sit on (to add a studs-up floor would require the roof to be higher, ruining the lines, or removing too much interior space for the minifigs). As a result, the minifigs are sitting on 2×4 plate “sleds” which slide into the ship and sit loosely. The cockpit canopy is hinged on the sides.

This model was built mainly using parts from the Enzo Ferrari 1:17 set, borrowing parts from Prehistoric Power and Speedboat sets. Why such a limited source of parts? I’m on vacation in the east coast away from my LEGO collection, but I bought the above sets at the LEGO store during BrickFest 2006.

It’s a little strange to be building LEGO away from home, and with an unfamiliar and reduced palette. Still, I got a lot of great new parts which I look forward to combining with my collection at home when I return.

Update: I have also posted pictures of this model on Brickshelf.
Update: I also posted about this on Lugnet and Classic-Space.com.[tags]lego,space,snot[/tags]

BrickFest 2006, Day 3 – Turn out the lights, the party’s over…

So that brings us to the final day of BrickFest 2006. My pictures are up on Flickr and just about everyone’s gone home. I started the day by attending a discussion on Capital Ships run by some of the experts from classic-space.com, including Jon Palmer, Adrian Drake, Mark Sandlin, and Chris Giddens. We met in a conference room on the first floor where we discussed some of the techniques and challenges for building and transporting very large spaceships made of LEGO, and then we went up to the exhibit hall where some of these things were demonstrated on the ships there.

After that I went to a discussion on LEGO as art vs. LEGO as toy, which was led by Roy T Cook, who in addition to being a LEGO builder is also a professor at Villanova University. I think the consensus was that while LEGO is a toy, it can be used as an art medium, but it depends on a number of factors including the context in which the model is made. I learned a lot about the philosophy of art and it gave me a lot to think about.

The afternoon was taken up with dealing with the crowds who attended the public exhibition. After they cleared out around 4 pm, we started tearing down the displays in the exhibit hall. My vignettes took about 30 seconds to tear down, but some of the guys didn’t finish until after midnight. We had closing ceremonies in the evening with a lot of door prizes being handed out. I didn’t win any, but I was pretty happy winning the small vignette contest.

Holly and I went out to dinner at a great Japanese restaurant in Fairfax called Blue Ocean (where we had also had the most amazing lunch on Friday). The food was great, but they were very busy so the service was slow.

After dinner we returned to the hotel where I hung out with the Classic Space guys and we stood around chatting until they were done tearing down, then we retired to the (closed) hotel bar where we all sat around talking until about 1 am. I drove Tom McDonald to the airport, came back to the hotel, and went to bed. I can’t wait for next year! In the meantime I hope we can attend Northwest BrickCon in Seattle and/or BrickSouth in Atlanta next spring.[tags]lego, brickfest, brickfest2006[/tags]

Brickfest 2006, Day 2 – and some good news

I’ve uploaded my pictures of Day 2 of Brickfest 2006 to Flickr.

The good news? We won!!! Our model “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” won the award for best small vignette out of all the vignette models at Brickfest! Holly and I are very pleased. Thanks to everyone who voted for it. Here’s a picture I took the other day of the winning model:
[tags]lego,brickfest,brickfest2006[/tags]

Brickfest 2006, Day 1

Day one of Brickfest 2006 is done.

I spent a lot of time looking over the MOCs that had been brought in since the night before, and attended a facinating presentation on making brickfilms, which I recorded on my camcorder and plan to post on YouTube soon. The exhibit halls had been updated quite a lot with new models being brought in that morning so I took a lot of new pictures.[tags]lego,brickfest,brickfest2006[/tags]

Poetry Vignettes

My latest models were unveiled at BrickFest yesterday: vignettes illustrating poetry by Robert Frost and A. E. Housman.

These poetry vignettes are not just my work, however. For the first time I have collaborated with my wife Holly to create LEGO models. While I did almost all of the actual assembly, she had the basic idea, did most of the minifig work, and helped a lot with the design, especially with the “Yonder See the Morning Blink” model. I really enjoyed sharing my hobby with her and hope that we can do more projects like these together.

Click the photo or title to see a bigger picture of each vignette, and a link to the text of each poem:

“The Road Not Taken”
by Robert Frost

“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
by Robert Frost

“Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now”
by A. E. Housman

“Mending Wall”
by Robert Frost

“Good Creatures, Do You Love Your Lives”
by A. E. Housman

“To an Athlete Dying Young”
by A. E. Housman

“Yonder See the Morning Blink”
by A. E. Housman

Or, view all the photos in my photoset on flickr. New! Also available on Brickshelf.[tags]lego,poetry,vignette,vignettes,housman,frost,aehousman,robertfrost[/tags]