Today’s guest article about building with color comes from Steven W. Howard (aka Ghalad), a prolific MOC builder featured in the LEGO House Masterpiece Galley and a future LEGO set designer. All thoughts and opinions expressed in the article are his own. What’s Your Color? Every time I set out to do the Color Wheel Challenge, the song “Colors” by Stella Jang is ringing in my ear… “What’s your color? I wanna know. What’s your color? I wanna know. What’s your color? I wanna know. I wanna know. I wanna know. I wanna know.” For two years in a row, I have completed a digital LEGO take on the popular art community challenge called the Color Wheel Challenge. What is that, you might ask? In the artist community, it involves creating a character or artwork for each color on a color wheel. This was quite popular on Twitter and YouTube in 2023. View...

Just a few days ago, I received the latest addition to the LEGO Ideas family, 21358 Minifigure Vending Machine. I was very excited to see the set, as probably many of you will be, and I’m happy to report that… it didn’t disappoint. My first impression of the box was that the set is going to be a cool display piece, and of course, it brought a lot of nostalgic memories. It took me down to memory lane and I felt like a kid again! The Build The initial steps of the building experience are nothing special, but throughout going through numbered bags with the pieces, you get to enjoy the large number of minifigures included (more about those later). Then you get to the mechanism thing. Every two pages, I was like “wait, what?” I’m not much of a Technic guy, and the whole time I was adding those axels,...

We are pleased to feature another guest article from Deep Shen, a well-rounded builder who discusses the hidden math of LEGO, with this article looking at LEGO math from a different angle… or two. Deep’s portfolio of work can be found at Brick Builder’s Handbook, on his Flickr page, and on Instagram. About the “Sugar Grid” You’ve probably been hearing or reading about the “sugar grid” technique for placing LEGO pieces at angles. This term was coined by Chris Enockson, who has an excellent and fast-growing YouTube channel, Brick Sculpt, that talks about building techniques among other LEGO-related topics. There’s also a highly informative and well-received article by Arno Knobbe on this topic that was posted on New Elementary. So, how does the “sugar grid” fit into the framework of angled wall techniques that have been discussed in my previous articles on LEGO math (and were covered in my book, The LEGO Builder’s Handbook)? Let’s find out! Mathematically speaking, all...

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LEGO by nature lends itself to more square and rectangular shapes—it’s where most of us start: buildings, blocky vehicles, and squared-off attempts at capturing organic shapes. The ever-widening parts pallete allows for more rounded and smooth shaping, and there are many techniques for escaping the grid. Curves are still challenging but we can take advantage of the gaps between LEGO bricks to make curves! You can’t really talk about “Brick Bending” without looking at the work of Jeff Sanders. My initial exploration into brick bending is largely based on his videos. He truly pushes the brick in some fantastic ways. Check out his YouTube channel and website for some fantastic creations. His work tends to be on very large scales which is fun to look at all the geometric fun he warps the bricks into. Despite the sort of clickbait titles of his YouTube videos, they are well-produced and work you through the builds nicely. But...