Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.build.ancient
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Date:
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Sun, 15 Oct 2006 22:29:02 GMT
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Viewed:
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9770 times
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Hi, Bruce!
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Dang you! Every time you post a new installment it makes me
feel horrid over my own long-neglected projects.
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Gosh, and I felt crappy about there being a three month gap between this update
and the last for The Brick Testament. Sometimes you just need to lock yourself
in a room full of LEGOs and a camera for a couple of weeks and not come out
until you’ve got a website update. Remember to bring food into the room first,
though. Not just LEGO food either.
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On Peace - Great implementation of the Lowell Sphere!
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Thanks. I had grander ambitions at first. I was going to build one section of
a 15-inch diameter globe, and my plan was to just have the “top” section of the
globe in the photo. I even spent a couple of hours working on putting this
together, but eventually found that (1) I didn’t have enough plates for even one
section of such a globe, and (2) it was a pain in the butt and I kept making
mistakes.
So then I had the thought to try making a globe out of the original 6.8-stud
diameter Lowell Sphere. Obviously the land masses and ocean shapes are
abstract, but I was pleasantly surprised with how it looked overall.
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On Family - How did you get Jesus’ arms out like that? Did you cheat with
glue or is there some clever build solution that I’m not seeing?
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There have been many instances in The Brick Testament where I’ve wanted a
character’s arms to be able to do more than just angle upward or downward. I’ve
tried a few different methods to achieve this (notably for the crucifixion), but
this time I was determined to come up with something better.
Did I cheat? Well, yes and no, but more on the no side. It’s a purely-LEGO
solution, but it didn’t turn out quite as elegant as I’d hoped. What I did was
detach Jesus’s arms and then I ran a small black LEGO rubber band through the
arm holes of the torso, so that most of the rubber band was inside the torso,
but the ends were poking out of the holes. Then I put the rubber band ends
around the arm socket connector studs, but with the arms out to the sides as you
see them in the photo.
This turned out to be decently stable. That is, the rubber bands were not
constantly popping off, nor the arms falling off each time you moved the figure.
But not totally stable either; the connection would come apart if you tweaked
the arm positions too much.
Up to this point, no cheating. But when I reveiwed how the photos turned out, I
made an aesthetic decision that the black rubber bands were a bit too visible.
I figured that other LEGO builders might realize what was going on, and I was
fine with that. But I thought the dark circles surrounding Jesus’s shoulders
would confuse non-LEGO builders. So I photoshopped them almost completely out.
(If you look
very
closely, you can still see a little bit of black in the arm pits and at the
shoulders.)
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Great house. My favorite of the violence scenes is probably
the daughter against mother.
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Bonk. Hee-hee. I wonder if one day I will tire of seeing LEGO-on-LEGO
violence.
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On Faith - Great microscale city. I like the punchline with the mountain
throwing up a tidal wave, though for some reason the upside down mountain
looks odd to me.
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Hmmm... maybe I should have made its base meatier. Perhaps it looks too 2-D.
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On Prayer - For some reason I really like the sock on the floor of the room.
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Yeah, it gives the scene a nice informal touch. My girlfriend was very
surprised there was actually a LEGO sock piece.
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The Fabuland accordian in the corner is an odd touch.
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Yep.
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The detached arms for the praying guy work very well.
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Yeah, that was again something I’d wanted to do before (like when
George
W. Bush was praying for al-Qaeda), but didn’t get determined enough to pull it
off until now. Obviously this depends a lot on the camera angle since the arms
are completely detached here.
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I didn’t reallize there were so many colors of bread.
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Yes, strange that this is one area where LEGO has really come through with a
variety of fairly realistic colors. I only wish all the minifig hair pieces
came in these colors.
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On Hypocrisy - LOL on the plank. That phrase has always put a funny image in
my head, and you’ve captured it perfectly. Slight error alert - in the
shadow you can kind of see the piece holding up the plank.
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Good eye. I suppose I could have tried to diminish the support’s shadow in
Photoshop, but I’ll leave it in there for eagle-eyed observers like yourself to
find and say “a-ha!”.
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On Self Defense - Good choice of head for the tooth for a tooth guy.
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The eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth images are drawn straight from the Brawling
section of The Law. In a few instances where Jesus is quoting or making direct
allusion to passages from the Torah, I used illustrative “quotes” from older
Brick Testament stories.
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The pools of blood are effective.
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I was a little worried that without illustrating the actual striking of the
“other cheek”, this story might be hard to follow, but it seems like it flows OK
from the responses I’ve gotten.
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On Dogs and Pigs - The house in the first scene is really nice.
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I’m such a re-user! This side-of-house was seen earlier in
this scene. The only new twist is the slightly illuminated interior.
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I’m not a huge fan of the Duplo pigs. I actually prefer your original
brick built pigs
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If the requisite pieces were available in pink or the same orangey-pink as the
duplo baby-pigs, I’d probably stick with the brick-built ones. I kind of like
the Duplo pigs, I just wish their legs were differentiated. Oh, and that they
actually connected to anything else in the LEGO universe.
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On Hell - Great throne. That 2x2 plate with rail piece works really well.
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OK, glad that works. I had originally built this enormous and lavishly
decorated yellow (ie. golden) throne for the heavenly Jesus. It was pretty
cool, but the I thought I better check and see if there was any other
description of Jesus’s heavenly throne that my depiction might be contradicting.
I did a keyword seach for “throne” and indeed found a passage from Revelation
that similarly speaks of a heavenly throne (in connection with an end-time
judgment) but specifies that it is white (though does not further comment on its
appearance).
So out with the gold, in with the white.
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The Hell scene is very effective - it reminds me of some rennaissance
painting, but I don’t remember which. Did you base this on some particular
artwork?
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Though it’s not based on any particular work, I thought it had some small
similarity to the
Hell section of the Hieronymus Bosch triptych
The Garden of
Earthly Delights, only in that it is vertically-oriented, it’s subject is Hell,
and it has people in various stages of torment on multiple levels. Of course,
it’s much less surreal, has a much smaller scope, and is the work of a far
lesser artist.
But perhaps I’ve been influenced by another (or many other) specific depictions
of Hell without being aware of it. Certainly I’m going just as much off of the
pop-culture idea of hell as I am off of Jesus’s brief and vague descriptions of
a “lake of fire”, “a furnace”, “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his
angels”, and a place of “eternal punishment”.
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On Anger - Nice allusion to use the first pic in this installment. I really
like the blood pouring off in the beheading pic. Seems like those tiles
would have kept falling over during photography.
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Heh, actually I don’t think those tiles toppled even once. A miracle! :)
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I really like the electric chair design a lot.
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I realized I didn’t have a very good idea of what an electric chair looked like
before I went to make on in LEGO. And doing a Google Image Search turned up a
fair amount of gruesome examples (though most of them may have been stills from
movies, I think some of them were not). Maybe that will teach me to turn “Safe
Search” back on. But my favorite (though least useful of the bunch) was
this one (don’t
worry--not gruesome--safe for work).
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Great work, Brendan. You always inspire.
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That’s great to hear. Hope you can make the time to continue with your ongoing
projects, Bruce. Always great to get your comments.
-Brendan
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| Hey Brendan, Dang you! Every time you post a new installment it makes me feel horrid over my own long-neglected projects. On Peace - Great implementation of the Lowell Sphere! On Family - How did you get Jesus' arms out like that? Did you cheat with (...) (18 years ago, 15-Oct-06, to lugnet.build.ancient, FTX)
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