The cartoon blog of Andertoons cartoonist Mark Anderson. He discusses his cartoons, cartooning, comics and, oddly enough, LEGO.
Wow! Who knew my LEGO alphabet spaceships would travel so far!
A quick (and completely incomplete) list of where they’ve been as of late:
Thanks everyone!
See them here and at Flickr.
When I was a kid growing up on Star Wars, I thought the X-wing was the best spaceship I’d ever seen. Of course the Millennium Falcon was great, and goodness knows the good old NCC-1701 was awesome, but the X-wing and its letter inspired brethren the Y-wing and A-wing (what the hell was with the B-wing?! It looked nothing like a B!) were just the coolest.
So later on as I got back into LEGO and was building spaceships I thought revisiting the idea of alphabet shaped ships would be fun.
It’s taken me almost two years (I have kids and a job after all), but now I’ve done all 26 letters of the alphabet in glorious spacey LEGO. Click on each pic to be taken to more pics on Flickr. (BTW, you can download them via the “view all sizes” link in the Flickr light box.)
Enjoy:
A – Not bad for my first try. It’s a little sparse, and the A is more implied than obvious, but not bad.
B – I started figuring out hinges on this one. It kinda reminded me of the old Bepsin Cloud Car.
C – This one was supposed to be some sort of giant antenna spy ship. All I know is that poor guy in the cockpit looks mighty cramped.
D – This one was an early attempt at making a ship seem well worn. And the pilot’s chair in the cockpit rotated as you moved the ship around. Neat!
E – Some sort of booze cruise ship and one of the larger I built. Plenty of passengers having a good time, and one not so much.
F – My first real asymmetric ship. Those are two really big engines on the front.
G – An open air space golf cart. I kid you not. I felt like I really figured out some good SNOT on this one.
H – I tried out some more color, and the hexagon engines turned out nicely.
I – It was hard to come up with something interesting for basically I straight line, but using 1x2x2 bricks for a tall engine worked out OK.
J – Some of my better greebling if I do say so myself.
K – This looks completely different from the front. You should check it out.
L – Keep on truckin’! And dig those engines!
M – Pew pew personified!
N – This ended up looking sort of off in the photo vs. what I’d imagined, but you build and learn…
O – Figuring out how to attach big clear windows without using non-clear pieces was a challenge.
P – One of my faves because 1) it’s orange, 2) it’s such an oddball design, and 3) Nnenn liked it. (I miss Nnenn.)
Q – Sort of a combination of what I’d learned from B and G. And you should see the wacky engines!
R – I don’t remember where I first saw the hinge idea I used over the windscreen, but I stole it lovingly. Dig the flame paint on this if you get a chance.
S – This one was a real toughy, but the rotating engine underneath the cockpit worked out well. And I finally got to use those old dark gray 2×8‘s!
T – My intergalactic tug. Love those tires!
U – By this point I’m pretty comfortable with a big curve and greebling. A fun fun shape to do!
V – I wanted to make V a really long one, and I had some new decorated tiles I couldn’t wait to use.
W – Sort of a Star Trek-y vibe, and I got to use lots and lots of yellow!
X – I wanted to avoid the X-wing design as much as possible and ended up with more of a TIE feel. That’s a lot of light bley.
Y – The killer tuning fork! Pew pew!!!
Z – A fitting end as I used almost every technique I’d learned over the two years. And I thought it ended up being significantly different from N.
Hope you enjoyed them! You can see them all over at Flickr too.
Hey, don’t forget to check out my LEGO Robot Santa Claus again!
Performing over fifty mega-checks per second is my LEGO version of Futurama’s Robot Santa Claus:
It took me a few months and gobs of red bricks but I think it turned out pretty well for my first shot at something this big. Here’s a pic for reference:
And here’s a few closeups for you:
Now, quick, move on to another blog before he gets "jolly on your naughty asses!"
A while back my wife was cross-stitching something for our daughter’s room and we were discussing trying to track down a superhero or Star Wars pattern for her to do next for the boy.
After a few days of fruitless searching, it hit me that maybe I could do a big LEGO mosaic instead.
I found a wonderful resource here and set to work.
1 – The Picture
It took a while to find a nice clean image, but the pic below of everyone’s favorite astromech was just what I was looking for. (Plus, it was a lot of colors that I knew I could pick up cheaply at BrickLink.)
2 – Photoshop
There are a number of pieces of software out there to do the pattern for you, but I chose to do it myself in Photoshop. I resized and adjusted the image to fit the number of bricks/pixels I wanted (48 x 72) and created a custom color palette using RGB values for the 1×1 plates that were available.
Then I adjusted the grid setting, and I had my pattern:
3 – Construction
The building was actually quite easy. I worked at my desk off of the pattern in Photoshop and got it done in probably 5 or 6 hours all told. I also let the boy help me put in all the blue background to his great delight.
Then I added the tile frame, glued the whole thing to some 1/8" plywood, and hung it up in the boy’s room.
Not bad, huh?
4 – LEGO Nerd Stuff
OK, for all of the AFOLs out there, I used 12 different colors of 1×1 plates.
White, Black, Very Light Gray, Light Gray, Light Bluish Gray, Dark Gray, Dark Bluish Gray, Blue, Medium Blue, Dark Blue, Red, and Trans Red.
It’s my first mosaic, but I’m really really pleased with the results. And the boy is ecstatic.