The Artful Brick

TL;DR: Original Price:   $39.95 Pieces: 552 Minifigure(s): No Sticker Sheet: Yes Pros: colorful and cheap (if on clearance) Cons: cheap and confusing Assembly:  Bag group 1 - T-Rex & Raptor Bag group 2 - Tree Bag group 3 - Pad thing & Dish thing Bag group 4 - Motorcycle Bag group 5 - Jeep Bag group 6 - Helicopter   Leftover Pieces & Sticker Interesting Techniques: The use of scalloped SNOT piece to make tank treads is pretty efficient; with Lego you'd have to use the un-scalloped piece and add 1x1 round tiles or plates to mimic the effect Interesting Pieces: The tree branches are designed to only fit together one way; on the one hand, this ensures that the final build will look like the picture, but on the other hand it denies any creativity The textured slopes on the pad thing are neat, I could see them being repurposed for the paws of a statue lion a'la NYC Library, for example The grooved slopes on the Jeep's fenders are also nice non-standard parts...

    Last month's LUG meeting (see also this post ) ended with a prompt for the next competition: Crocker and/or Underground. The LUG's leadership maintains a bank of prompt ideas, which is where "Underground" came from. Because the September meeting was the day before CrockerCon , a one-day local comics convention at the Crocker Art Museum, and they wanted to have some appropriate builds on their table, the other prompt was the Crocker museum itself. I had an idea right away—a micro-scale Crocker over a cave in which an artist creature draws inspiration from the galleries above—and sketched it out on a post-it note, then refined it on a gridded index card: The grid was particularly useful as I plotted out the buildings. I used Google aerial and street views to get a good sense of the buildings and their relative orientations (hot tip: set the street view to show autumn or winter, so there isn't foliage to get in the way of your view). I also took photos of my own ...