Red, White, Blue, and Brick

Today in what is commonly referred to as...'Murica, we celebrate our independence day. I'd like to showcase a ton of American Flags. Enjoy!

Lego Store Monthly Minibuilds for July of 2009. Photo by TooMuchDew.

American Flag by lachme.

American Flag. Photo by mhuffman.

American Flag in Transparent Pieces by Arthur Gugick.

A much larger American Flag in Transparent pieces. Photo by Goldenfire.

 

The Marine Corps War Memorial/Iwo Jima Memorial from the Legoland California Park. Photo by Eric Lumsden.

 

American Flag (from presumably another Legoland of some sort). Photo by allyhook.

 

The Lego Millyard Project by pzmancha.

 

Lex Luthor for President! by Oky - Space Ranger. Not necessarily 4th of July related, but...It'll do. ;)

 

4th of July 2009 by Tofer Watts.
'MURICA by Joel.Baker.

Tyler Clites did another one of his EMOTE's. This time: Independence Day.

Lastly, we have...

...the Iwo Jima Picture recreation. Photo by TooMuchDew. Story from his Flickr post here:
"Participants at WWB created the mosaic depicting US Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the US flag on Iwo Jima — the scene that was the basis for Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph and an iconic moment in US history. The mosaic was constructed on 225 Blue LEGO 10″ x 10″ baseplates and covers 156 square feet of wall space (12.5 ft x 12.5 ft or 230,400 studs)! Participants were rewarded with their choice of a custom US Marine or Army Ranger minifig for each 10″ x 10″ baseplate completed. The mosaic is comprised of the the original LEGO color palette: Blue baseplates and Red, White, Yellow and Black plates and will be on permanent display at Brickmania Toyworks."

Happy 4th! (Even to our non-US readers, so...just have a great day!)

A Host of Ye Olde Tapestries

tapestry [tap-uh-stree] - n. a fabric consisting of a warp upon which colored threads are woven by hand to produce a design, often pictorial, used for wall hangings, furniture coverings, etc.

The first is of a unicorn by Flickr user, jackiebritton. My favorite parts of this one include the shading of the back legs and the slope parts used to insert the unicorn horn.

Here's a mosaic found in Legoland, Windsor taken by Flickr user, Derringdos. I like the use of only five colors.



Majita Grguric made this Black Falcon mosaic, but unlike the tapestries here, this one is studs up, opposed to SNOT. The shading in the grey is just superb, though.


NewRight made this smaller tapestry of a castle. This one is probably my favorite out of the lot as the mist and clouds are really a great touch, as well as the color of the trees and the slopes at the top of the castle.


Flickr user, Daniel Z "DNL", created a hunting scene. This one is interesting by its use of multiple perspectives (with the tower and people). Once again, you can notice the little shading of the side of the tower and further away legs of the horse that make the mosaic great, as well as that he used both sideways and right side up SNOT techniques. It is a bit odd that the tower's top is not included inside the tapestry, though.

Bluesecrets made both of these tapestries, of which the one on the bottom won the category of best tapestry in the 2008 Colossal Castle Contest VI on Classic-Castle. The first is a recreation of her avatar, which is very smll, but effective. The second is of a knight. The scattering of colors the is really great, and the clouds are really spectacular too.

Sources:
- dictionary.com

SNOT Magic

I'm still super-preoccupied with the MocAthalon, so posts will be sparse this month, but I did see this cute mosaic from Legoland Florida.  The person who posted this on flickr called it a "grammatical error", which I can understand, but I suppose it is supposed to be an in-joke about SNOT, or "Studs Not On Top", a technique very clearly used in the sign (I spy cheese slopes!).  In that case, it probably would have been better to have it say, "It's SNOT magic." 



Either way, I still really like the image of the magician and his magic sparkles.  It's also neat how the mosaic is on a curve, and is not flat like mosaics normally are.  There are some other cute mosaics spread around the rest of the photo, too.

Mosaics at the Legoland Discovery Center!

Ok, so I recently stopped by the Legoland Discovery Center for my fourth time because the attendees of Brickworld 2011 got free coupons (and get 10% off at the gift shop!)! Coming back with a mindset to snap photos, I got a lot of photos of mosaics! Enjoy. ;-D

So first up we have a lot of castle pictures...


These sheild heraldry mosaics were at the beginning of the dragon ride and were pretty sweet. Following with the dragon theme...



...these were mosaics that were found during the dragon ride. The first photo turned out really nicely while the other one is not so great, as you can tell. It was quite difficult to get them while riding. =) I think these were my favorite ones. The glowed quite nicely in the dark.

Continuing on...


We also found this cartoony mosaic and was pretty neat.

Moving on away from Castle...




All these mosaics were found by the bathrooms. There were 2 day camps eating lunch at this time I took them, so they didn't turn out exactly like I wanted them to, but I'm hoping they're still easy to look at.

Across from the bathrooms by the "Model Workshop" section, we had some more "artistic" mosaics.

Now I'm sure that second one is Van Gogh's Starry Night, but I can't tell what the first one is. (If anyone knows, leave a comment or email me at mosaicbricks@gmail.com). The one below is the Mona Lisa, but didn't turn out that great due to a TON of glare.

*** Note, thanks to Bruce N H and rjg173 for letting me know the first one is "The Scream" by Edvard Munch.


So, yeah! There you go! There was one extra mosaic, but it had even more glare so I figured it wasn't even worth it. The interview with Ben Caulkins is coming up soon. Thanks for reading!

The Coolest MMORPG on the Web!

Since early 2010 (somewhere around March), I had the privilege of being a beta-tester for LEGO Universe. Not one of those people who's the very first person to try out the game, but I was still a tester very early on. I must say, watching the game develop from then, to now, has been a lot of fun. Seeing what I thought the game was going to be, to seeing it now is unreal. The minifigs for this game are insane! I thought you could had cool armor, but not awesome armor! Anyway, as the summer wrapped up and I got busy, I no longer could play the beta. I just didn't have any time, and then in late September, the beta finally closed. I'm not a full blown player, but I've seen some pretty sweet screenshots.

Anyway, in LEGOLAND California (I've been there once!), now has a brand new "Club House" that features LEGO Universe. Inside the club house, there's an awesome mosaic for the four main characters that represent the four different factions. Sentinel, Adventure, Assembly, and Paradox.



Check out more about the Clubhouse in Legoland here: LINK. And you can watch the brand new trailer for Lego Universe here: LINK