Pilgrim's Progress: A Family's Journey of Collaboration

There are some things that only happen once in a lifetime, so when they do, you go all out. Five siblings attending a LEGO convention together is one of those things, so when that happened to us at Brickworld Chicago earlier this year, we knew the achievement called for a big collaboration. But there was a hitch.

You might know that my family lives in South America. You almost certainly are aware that air travel is not known for its friendliness to LEGO creations. Besides, with the size of collaboration we were going for, there’d hardly have been enough room in our luggage! Enter the amazingly generous LEGO community, which helped us raise money through a GoFundMe. Dozens of PAB cups and BrickLink orders later, we had the bricks we needed to build a show stopper.

But bricks are only half the battle. Finding a strong concept for our collaboration was just as important. Everything was on the table, from a life-sized mech to a dragon with a city on its back. In the end, one idea was big enough to inspire everybody: Pilgrim’s Progress.

In case you aren’t familiar with the book, Pilgrim’s Progress was written in the sixteenth century by John Bunyan. The story is an allegory of a Christian’s journey through life, and the main character, conveniently named Christian, travels from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Along the way he battles demons, runs from giants, and struggles through swamps—plenty of excitement to bring life to our LEGO builds!

City of Destruction

Christian the pilgrim is NOTICEABLY absent from this picture—but it’s the best we can do, thanks to some hard drive shenanigans

The story starts at the City of Destruction, which Josiah chose to build in a gothic style, with a random figure hanging from a tower and red light hinting at the city’s inevitable end.

A critical part of our collab planning was our determination to build creations large enough to tell a compelling story even from across the aisle. Too many great builds get overlooked at cons because you can’t see them well enough from far away. To avoid this syndrome, we decided to make our characters extra large—about five times minifigure scale, to be precise. In retrospect that was crazy, but super rewarding.

Slough of Despond

At 5X minifigure scale, a 32x32 is a really small build

Josiah (with help from one of the Little Mice) continued the story at the Slough of Despond, where Christian wades through a soupy mess. This creation was a true collaboration: I told my younger sister what to do, she did it, and then Josiah refined it. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it to Chicago, but she did come with us to display the collaboration again at a smaller con.

The Wicket Gate

Anna’s creation is a masterclass in LEGO lettering

The Wicket Gate, by Anna proved to be an eye-catcher with its phenomenal lettering. Impressively, it was 360 viewable—emphasis on was. Unfortunately, Anna didn’t find a box quite large enough for the MOC, so it progressively became more destroyed each time we displayed it. And apparently the back side didn’t get rebuilt for the photography table.

Of course, responsible builders would have photographed these before taking them to cons… but cut us some slack, we flew into the country and built the whole thing in about two months. Trust me, we were building right up to the morning we packed the car!

The Cross

With all the building we were doing, saving on filler was a thing. This creation is built on a light framework and is very hollow inside.

The MOC card for this creation said Sarah, but if it had said Geneva instead it wouldn’t have been far wrong. I did the design work and assigned things like the tedious cobblestone path to Sarah. I also assigned the stones along the edge. They look okay but are as tenuously attached as you can imagine.

One of the first things built for the whole collaboration was the large figure of Christian in this MOC, built by Josiah, which was then copied and tweaked in different colors and poses for each creation.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

nothing like mist to draw kids’ attention at a con!

The Valley of the Shadow of Death—this was one of the first scenes I called dibs on. To be fair, I called dibs on a lot of scenes, and had to be talked out of biting off more than I could chew—but this one I stuck with. If you’ve been watching my photostream lately, you know I’ve gotten hooked on building dragons. This beast, Apollyon felt right up my alley. I chose to avoid the cliche evil red and try green instead; I think it worked great with tan for a cool-ugly vibe. Christian, encased in a full suit of armor, was a pleasure to build as well—and was to my surprise voted best Christian by my siblings. This was a dubious honor since the result was that we gave him away.

And then there’s the fog, which was just downright fun. I bought a cheap mister and lit it up with some yellow lights. Sadly, they rusted away long before this hit the photoshoot. The effect was satisfyingly spooky! It kind of did leak like a sieve though. Hooray for black tablecloths.

Vanity Fair

the lights on this one faded slowly in and out

Vanity Fair, by Isaiah is where Christian, still dressed in armor, is tempted by worldliness, and eventually put into a cage for saying that all he wanted to buy was truth. He is actually hanging in a cage somewhere in this build, but it proved to be impossible to find a good camera angle that captured the cage without capturing the blue filler bricks behind the house.

Fun fact about this creation: when Isaiah started it, he meant for it to be the City of Destruction, and Josiah was supposed to be building Vanity Fair. Fast forward to Brickworld minus 10 days, when both creations were about 3/4 completed, and you can see why I made an executive decision (only mildly protested) to switch their positions.

Doubting Castle

doubting castle had an unexpected sound effect: water from the mister hit the landscape and fell back down with a dripping sound.

Doubting Castle was another collaborative effort. I (fittingly) doubted several times whether it would be built at all—but Isaiah took a break from Vanity Fair long enough to build me this chunky orc, and after that, I had no choice but to do my part. I enlisted help from some younger siblings and even my Mom and Dad to do the tedious alien-esque lines on the castle sides.

In the end, this castle is really just a sketch model barely redeemed from the junk bin by a mister and some red lights, but we were scraping the bottom of the barrel both on bricks (take a look at that patchy Christian figure!) and time with this one. It definitely helped fill a gap in the collab and was tall enough to feel in keeping with the other creations.

Delectable Mountains

there are bees, butterflies, frogs, and mushrooms tucked away in this creation

Another creation largely built by one of my younger sisters (I have four younger sisters, so just get used to it), one of the Little Mice. I designed the sheep and she took it from there. It made for a beautiful little pause in the journey from MOC to MOC along the collab route.

Celestial City

the celestial city is one of the few 360 viewable MOCs of this collab, but around back is nothing special, just a white and tan wall

Last but not least, the Pilgrim’s Progress comes to an end at the Celestial City. I went through so many design iterations for this creation, from wanting to build a whole city (say, how big are these figures? Never mind!) to an approach with a few houses leading up to a gate, to the decision to stick to the basics and just go as big as I could. To tell you the truth, when I got a glimpse of the size of Isaiah’s Vanity Fair house (and at one point, he was threatening to do two houses with an alleyway between them), I panicked and ordered a ton of white bricks—but not too many, by any means.

The MOC has some fun features, like a built-in screen (actually, there’s an entire Raspberry Pi in there) which allows me to play a loop of twinkling light and lots of lighting. The blue at the bottom was a compromise: I wanted a complete river but couldn’t find a way to make that look natural without a massive piece of landscape. The tree pictured here is not my best tree—there was a better one at Brickworld Chicago, but it fell over several times, even on the display table, and by the time I got to take pictures of it here, I was pretty sick of it!

If you’d like to see all that one more time and enjoy Isaiah narrating the appropriate parts of Pilgrim’s Progress, I’ve put together a video just for you:

Have you ever organized a con collaboration? How does ours stack up? Let me know in the comments below!

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