New Hashima takeover week on BrickNerd continues with an article by contributor Chris Roberts about the efforts required to light up the cyberpunk LEGO city. Welcome to New Hashima A massive 160-square-foot, 13-foot tall cyberpunk city built entirely out of LEGO would be awe-inspiring on its own. But that wasn’t enough for Stefan and the New Hashima Daemons. We needed lights. And not just a few here or there, oh no—we needed thousands of blinking, flashing, glowing, and pulsing lights! Brickworld Chicago is famous for its Saturday night World of Lights event where the entire convention hall goes dark for a few hours to let the MOCs shine. Making the most of those hours of darkness was the specific goal and the focus for all the lights that went into the city. The lights brought New Hashima to life and gave it a soul. Electrical Infrastructure Routing power cables within a...

LEGO has announced the winner of the LEGO Ideas Singles’ Day – Me, Myself, and I building contest and the next set to become a future gift with purchase set. The fan vote consisted of 15 entries and the grand prize winner is Reading, Reading, Reading by Fr_An. This set will now go into production and will be released as a GWP in the future. Of course, there’s no mentioning on when it be out but it’ll most likely be some time next year. The post LEGO Ideas Singles’ Day – Me, Myself, and I Winner Announced as Future GWP appeared first on The Brick Fan. Original linkOriginal author: Allen "Tormentalous" Tran

LEGO has officially revealed a brand new LEGO Harry Potter set with the Gringotts Wizarding Bank Collectors’ Edition (76417). Releasing on September 1, the set has 4,803 pieces and retails for $429.99. The set features scenes from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as well as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 with a section of the Gringotts Bank as well as the underground vault, complete with the mine cart roller coaster. It also has the Ukranian Ironbelly Dragon that you can put on top of the bank. You can also combine the set with Diagon Alley (75978) by putting it in the middle of the buildings. HEAD TO THE VAULT WITH THE INCREDIBLE NEW LEGO HARRY POTTER GRINGOTTS WIZARDING BANK SET Today the LEGO Group in partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products unveils the LEGO® Harry Potter Gringotts Wizarding Bank set, the latest addition to...

New Hashima takeover week on BrickNerd continues with an article by guest contributor Mike Willhoit who coordinated the “Old City” Sector of New Hashima. He writes about the planning and effort that gave the sector a gritty edge, making it the seedier side of the cyberpunk city. True Grit When we began planning for New Hashima, I had always envisioned a sector of the city that felt noticeably older, grittier, and grungier than the rest of the city. Every place seems to have something like this: older-style buildings, less up-to-date infrastructure, and maybe even a kind of modernist, planned community feel to it. I landed on this idea because there are layers to every city. Time periods collide in awkward ways, new stuff gets strapped on and piled onto old stuff, and it really just creates this unique vibe that I think is quintessentially cyberpunk. The keyword is palimpsest; ornate styles...

Welcome to New Hashima takeover week at BrickNerd! This week we will be exploring the gigantic cyberpunk city collab built by more than 60 people at Brickworld Chicago 2023. Today’s guest article is by Stefan Formentano (with help from Simon Liu) who led the charge to build this incredible LEGO display and community. It All Started With A Photo In 2013 I saw a photo: Photo by chris Edwards Little did I know this would change the direction of my hobby and LEGO life forever. As a self-professed Grey Castle fan, seeing BroLUG’s Cyber City blew my mind and shattered what I thought was even possible with LEGO. It fundamentally changed my building trajectory as I knew from that moment I wanted to build my own Cyber City someday. It took almost six years and a bit of a career change to get me started building what would eventually become New...

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published July 27, 2021. What is MILS? Modular Integrated Landscaping System, or MILS for short, is a system that describes how to build modular landscapes. The modularity of MILS is its key innovation. By standardizing both how modules interconnect and the visual features of module boundaries; builders can combine their modules into collaborative layouts while maintaining consistency of style and appearance. The origin of MILS can be traced back to HispaBrick Magazine issue 013. Antonio Bellon’s series of five articles (issues 013 to 017) are a must-read if you want an in-depth overview of the MILS standard and its background. The key principles of MILS are as follows: Collaboration - This is a core principle of MILS. The MILS system was created to allow builders to combine modules to make large collaborative layouts and dioramas. Flexibility - The formality of the MILS standard is mostly...

Best of BrickNerd - Article originally published July 28, 2022. So lights are cool, right? Everything looks more awesome when you add lights to it: Houses, cars, PCs (you have no idea how much RGB madness is pumping out of the thinky box on my table)… and especially LEGO. In the past here at BrickNerd, Are talked about why one would want to add lights to an existing MOC, and Rob from Brickstuff gave a fantastic tour of his company’s history and offerings. We’ve also had Ann delve into how you can use existing lights on hand for spectacular results in MOC photography. But in my admittedly lackluster research effort, I have yet to see a good overview of what all the options are for LEGO lighting. So that’s what we’ll do here: This article will delve into your options, what you might want to use lighting for, what types of...

To help preserve some of the best LEGO content from the community, today we are pleased to share a guest article from Katie Walker who walks us through the steps of creating a LEGO cheese slope mosaic. Katie was originally one of the main contributors at MosaicBricks, a LEGO blog started by Casey McCoy that ended in 2014. Say Cheese! One of my favorite things to do with LEGO is to use cheese slopes to make different mosaics. I once took a series of photographs that show how to make a simple stained-glass window out of cheese slopes. I'm going to present them here, with some instructions on how to do it. First off, here is the final result: Any of the colors can be changed, of course; I love to take a design that fits into a certain space, and then change the coloring repeatedly until I find all the...

BrickHeadz are an interesting product. They are supposed to be a recognizable brick-built, blocky visualization of your favorite character from movies, TV shows, books, or even LEGO-owned themes. Yet one of their key features is how static they are. There is little to no inherent movement in a BrickHeadz character which makes photographing them both easy yet hard because they are made in the style of figurines. Today I will try to change that. The LEGO Group generously provided BrickNerd with these three new Harry Potter-themed BrickHeadz, and the team challenged me to give them a little bit more life. Harry Potter's Wizarding World is full of magical spells, moving portraits and surprising transformations. For today’s charms class, we're going to try six fun "spells" to create scenes with movement to bring these characters to life. Improvised Action Poses The most popular sport in the magical world, Quidditch, is an extremely...

It’s always nice to see a great MOC with a neat backstory, like these incredible action figures made by JNCE. At first glance, you just see two Chinese warriors, but there’s more to it—and JNCE was willing to share that with us at BrickNerd in a quick interview! Marco: Can you tell me what inspired you to build these action figures?  JNCE: There was a MOC contest in the Chinese community and the theme was something related to Chinese traditional culture with double/dual definition. It was a little bit difficult for me to find a good subject to build. Finally, I choose these action figures to reflect Chinese Door Gods which I thought is quite suitable to the requirement. Marco: Can you explain what these figures mean in Chinese culture? JNCE: It's an old tradition in China that people post two images of ancient generals (Qin Qiong and Yuchi Gong) on...