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...