Recently, there was a Lego Brick Factor challenge near my home, where the company holds an open contest to see who the new “master builder” for an opening discovery center will be. I was able to participate, and was one of 40 people out of 171 to make it to the 2nd round. sadly, I didn’t make it to the final 12, but I’m hoping there will be more opportunities for assistant builders when the center gets closer to opening in May.  In the weeks leading up to the event, however, I was encouraged to practice my building skills, so I set myself some challenges. I tested myself to see if I could build a sphere (at least half of one, with the amount of bricks I had) a lifesize human hand, and an original word tower design. (“Play well” is what the term Lego originated from in Danish)

Found some more pictures of lego sculptures that I made when I was about 15 or 16, I think.  Wish I’d been a better photographer back then! The drawings are copies I made from Nintendo Power Magazine, which turned out to be a great way to practice different styles of art, and had a lot to do with all the drawing and art I did in high school. The lego models were another sort of challenge, seeing how detailed I could get in 3-d when I only had 2-d models to work with (this was before the Nintendo 64 came out, of course!) There were more, I had lego versions of the Michael Keaton movie Batmobile, Samus from Metroid, Solar Jetman, even the vehicle from Blaster Master (aka “S.O.P.H.I.A.”).

Sometimes I really miss my legos. I had a huge assortment of them growing up, and some of my best times were playing with them, building everything from cities to stuff from movies to giant marble ramp contraptions.  I wish I’d taken more pictures, but this is one of the few I’ve dug up - it’s of most of the creatures from the Neverending story, one of my favorite childhood movies.  Falcor, the Rock Biter, Morla, the ancient one, even the stupid bat and racing snail.