17. Beautiful Lego

Book: Beautiful Lego

Author: Mike Doyle

Number of pages: 267

What I’m watching: TV: The League

What I’m playing: Skyrim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            When I was growing up, nothing could make me lose all sense of time quite like Legos. Whether I was adventuring or battling with my band of Lego people or crafting some new design for a fort or flying car, I would spend hours playing.¹ I still have a bunch of Legos. My fiancé and I recently date-nighted building the Millennium Falcon set. So, a coffee table book of Lego art? I’m über excited.

            It’s hard to not just show a hundred pictures from Beautiful Lego and say, “Holy crap! That’s amazing!” But…

Holy crap! Can you imagine the scale of that sculpture? It’s a city of skyscrapers on a mountain surrounded by all those teeny village houses. The detail! It looks incredible. That is definitely worthy of the cover art. I also love Micah Berkoff’s NES.

He took something I love and recreated it artistically using another something I love.
            The book gives a survey of many different artists’ works and includes a few words from some of them about Legos. Its cool seeing all the different things people do with Legos: what they build, what pieces they use and how, the scale they use, their style. Ramón and Amador Alfaro Marcilla mention listening to music while crafting their Lego art and having that influence the piece’s “mood” (6). I totally get music playing during a longer delve into my Legos. Sometimes, the artwork can be a bit creepy, like one model of Shakespeare or the Marcilla Brothers’ “The Doll.”

The diversity in artists within this book not only demonstrates all the different approaches and styles of LEGO art, it showcases all the different subjects that people choose to LEGO-ify. Even if I’m not always crazy about the finished project, some of my other favorite subjects found in Beautiful Lego include Harley Quinn, Audrey II, The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, V, Bilbo Baggins with Gollum, Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse, Stephen Hawking, and these guys²:

            It’s also fun finding unique Lego pieces being used in the artwork. A glow-in-the-dark magic wand creatively becomes a star on top of a Christmas tree. Parts of one Bionicle warrior (I’m pretty sure at one point I owned all of them) help build an awesome-looking archer.

 

It’s like a Where’s Waldo!

            The only problem with a book of Lego sculptures is that the pictures only display one angle of 3-dimesnsional art. There’s more to see than can be shown by the pictures. Like in the sculpture “Stairway,” I found another picture of it online and learned the big guy’s got a hole going all the way out his back.

            There was a huge section in Beautiful Lego about spaceships. Unexpectedly, I wasn’t super excited by them. I was more interested in some of the cars. I mean, building Lego cars was the coolest! Wheels were the best.

Reading Beautiful Lego, I get the sense that the wide variety of Lego artwork in the book is hardly wide at all, but a mere tip of a titanic iceberg. Hell, I’ve built Lego art.

This was supposed to be a recreation of Notre Dame de Chartres (a modest one, because my sources were limited). But then I got pictures from the internet mixed up and based the face of the church off of Notre Dame de Paris. So it’s inspired by both. Whoops. I also like to create fantasy creature mounts for my Lego people.

            Like I said earlier, Beautiful Lego is chock-full of amazing pieces of art.³ Too many to show all of them, but there’s a really cool Pegasus, an adorably itty-bitty duck, and a guy vacuuming a ghost, because with Legos, you can build whatever you want.

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?):

 

 

Notes

1. Less fun was the huge amount of time it also took to clean up. Picking up a mountain of Lego pieces off of carpet was the worst.

2. I certainly wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition to appear twice in a row.

3. Or should I say block-full?

 

Works Cited

Doyle, Mike. Beautiful Lego. San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2013. Print.

 

Lego Artwork Credits

(in order of appearance)

Contact 1: The Millenial Celebration of the Eternal Choir at K’al Yne, Odan, Mike Doyle (2013)

Nintendo Entertainment System, Micah Berkoff (2009)

The Doll, Ramón and Amador Alfaro Marcilla (2008)

“Nobody Expects…The Spanish Inquistion!” Iain Heath (2011)

Family Portrait, Nathan Proudlove (2011)/Kathrienna, Eero Okkonen (2011)

Stairway, Nathan Sawaya (2009)

Ford Hot Rod, Dennis Glaasker (2012)/Solar Flare – 1960 Impala Wagon, Lino Martins (2008)

Cathedral de Notre Dame, Sam Shircel (2010)

Fire Dragon/Lizard-Rider, Sam Shircel (I Don’t Remember)