LEGO Art

Ready to create a LEGO art sculpture? Once you've got your resource material together and have a sense of where your project is going, all it takes is bricks, time and patience. According to Sawaya:
Depending on the project, I spend differing amounts of time. Each project involves the snapping of individual bricks together, so you have to be patient with this job. Some smaller projects can go quickly, like over the course of the weekend, while other larger projects involve months of designing and building. Of course, even the smaller jobs have hang-ups. While working on a bust of David Letterman, I spent a week just trying to figure out his glasses.

LEGO bricks are tiny compared to sculpture-scale projects. "Large pieces usually involve sketching out ideas, but the true test is being able to picture the finished model in my mind. Since sculpting with LEGO is a slow process," Sawaya says, "I have to be able to recognize early on where pieces need to go to develop the shape of the piece as I build upwards. It takes a lot of pieces to get this right, and often I will tear down portions that I have built, so as to rebuild them differently."

Sawaya connects two large pieces of an 8-foot pencil.
Image courtesy Nathan Sawaya
Sawaya connects two large pieces of an 8-foot pencil.
The inside of the Sawaya's oversized pencil demonstrates staggering and bracing.
Image courtesy Nathan Sawaya
The inside of Sawaya's oversized pencil demonstrates staggering and bracing.

Builders' construction techniques vary, but most people start at the bottom and work up and out. "The process of sculpting with LEGO is usually a bottom-up approach," says Sawaya. "Meaning, I start at the bottom and build my way to the top of the piece. This generally means that balancing issues have already been dealt with by the time I finish a model."

On Size and Time
Among Sawaya's finished projects is a replica of a Chris Craft Speedster. It's more than 10 feet in length, and it holds the world record for the largest LEGO boat. "I used almost a quarter of a million bricks," Sawaya says. "I spent eighteen hours a day for 10 days to complete it."

Whether you're building by trial and error or with detailed sketches, there are a few techniques that will help make your final construction sturdy. Staggering bricks, the way builders stagger bricks when building houses, makes wall portions stronger. You can also brace the interior of hollow structures with columns and beams made from additional bricks. A good resource for learning about making your own LEGO constructions is Allan Bedford's The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide. You can also find lots of information on building and creating in the online publication BrickJournal.

We'll look at some of our favorite LEGO art sculptures in the next section.