Tag Archives: lego

LEGO Batman Returns Batmobile is a striking new build with exclusive minifigure

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Batman LEGO sets are particularly popular among pop culture enthusiasts, whether they love the comic books or the movies. Throw in a Batmobile and it’s Christmas. While there have been many recreations of the Cape Crusader’s vehicle in brick form, Tim Burton’s 1992 sequel Batman Returns never saw its Batmobile turned into a set until now.

LEGO has given a brick makeover to 1966 TV show’s vehicle in a 1,822-piece scaled-down replica and the more recent LEGO Technic Batmobile from Robert Pattinson’s The Batman. There is even a fan-created LEGO Batmobile with hyper-realistic details. Adding to this fleet, the new 2,269-piece LEGO DC Batman set recreates the Batmobile from Batman Returns for the first time in LEGO brick form, set to release in September.

Designer: LEGO

Inspired by Michael Keaton’s legendary 1992 film Batman Returns, the new LEGO brick set channels the sleek profile, meticulous details, and innovative transformation function and hidden references from the film. The model celebrates one of cinema’s most recognizable superhero rides. Once put together, the brick set takes an elongated form, similar to the one in the movie, with jet turbine rear engine, an opening canopy, and a detailed cockpit. Each intricate detail is inspired by memorable moments from the movie; it even includes The Penguin’s tracking device. When you are done building, you can rid Gotham City of crime all on your own.

You can slide open the canopy to peek inside. The intricate replica has a detailed cockpit, complete with a steering wheel and control panels to help the morally gray vigilante in a night of crime-fighting. While every detail is appreciated, what catches the attention most is the transformation feature. For the first time in a LEGO Batmobile, you can press a button to release the vehicle’s side panels to reveal an even sleeker Batmissile escape vehicle hidden within. This particular feature calls back to the on-screen sequence when The Penguin takes over the control of the Batmobile with Batman inside and sets out to destruction. To escape capture, Batman rips out wires from within and releases the side panels to slip through a narrow alleyway.

There is an innovative lift-arm mechanism recreating the dramatic transformation from the movie, letting you display the model as either the Batmobile or the Batmissile. This should also help you escape the plotting of villains as you fight crime in Gotham City. If you want to leave this task up to the Caped Crusader, LEGO has included a new Batman Minifigure with a newly molded cape and displayed on a dedicated stand with the Batman Returns logo. The striking Batmobile, probably the best LEGO build ever, measures over 4 inches high, 17 inches long, and 6.5 inches wide.

The LEGO DC Batman: Batman Returns Batmobile (76355) will be available on the LEGO Store, starting September 1 for LEGO Insiders and September 4 for everyone else. If you want to get this iconic set for yourself or for a DC fan, it will cost $300.

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3 Brothers Finally Solved the LEGO Mess for £1,850

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If you’ve ever stepped barefoot onto a LEGO brick at 2 a.m., you already understand the problem the Brickle was made to solve. But the solution the Newland brothers arrived at goes far beyond a plastic bin with compartments. It’s a piece of furniture. Real furniture. The kind that earns a permanent spot in your home and actually makes the room look better for being there.~

The Brickle is a LEGO storage and sorting table, handcrafted in Wales by three brothers: Ben, a nano-scientist; Matt, an engineer; and Geoffrey, an LSE graduate. The product came out of a very ordinary parental frustration. Ben noticed his kids had stopped building their own things. They were only following kit instructions, because digging through a jumbled pile of bricks to find the one piece you need takes too long and kills the creative momentum entirely. His first attempt at a solution started with rough MDF and a lot of trial and error. Fourteen prototypes later, the Brickle was born.

Designers: Matt, Ben, and Geoffrey Newland

That origin story matters because it’s what separates this product from every other overpriced gadget that promises to fix something you’ve been managing just fine without. The Brickle wasn’t designed in a boardroom. It came from a dad who wanted his kids to build more freely, and then happened to have two brothers with the right skill sets to help him do it properly.

The design itself is genuinely considered. The filtration system sorts bricks by size as they’re dropped in, which means the sorting happens as part of play rather than as a separate chore nobody wants to do. The drawers are accessible, the surface doubles as a proper play table, and the whole unit is built to last long enough to hand down. Wallpaper* Magazine described it as “the most elegant LEGO storage system ever made,” and it’s difficult to argue with that. It looks like something from a high-end children’s furniture brand, not a toy storage category.

The price reflects that. The cream version starts at £1,850, with an oak version at £3,650. That’s a significant amount of money, and I don’t think it’s useful to pretend otherwise. But the conversation around the Brickle isn’t really about whether it’s affordable. It’s about what it represents: the idea that objects designed for children don’t have to be ugly, that good design and practicality aren’t mutually exclusive, and that some things are worth making extremely well even if fewer people can buy them. The Brickle sits comfortably alongside other premium design pieces that parents justify not as toys but as furniture investments. Which is exactly what it is.

The creativity angle is arguably its most compelling argument. Parents who own a Brickle consistently report that their kids started building original things instead of just following kit instructions. One parent noted that her daughters were finding it easier to create their own sets and games. Another mentioned that the sorted, accessible layout helped his son with ADHD stay focused long enough to actually finish builds. These aren’t polished marketing claims. They’re the kind of specific, unscripted feedback that usually only shows up when a product genuinely changes how someone uses a space.

The Brickle also comes in a smaller version called the Brickle Bach (Bach is Welsh for small), which handles up to 9 kilograms of bricks. Matching stools and shelves round out the range, meaning you can pull together an entire LEGO corner that looks like it was designed on purpose.

The Newland brothers still operate out of a workshop on the West coast of Wales, which adds a quiet layer of meaning to the whole thing. This isn’t a startup that found a manufacturer and slapped a logo on it. It’s a family making something they believe in, in a place that means something to them. The LEGO chaos in your home isn’t going anywhere. But with the Brickle, it might finally have a place that suits it.

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Someone Built A 1,064-Piece LEGO Super Saiyan Goku And It Looks Stunning

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For most of its existence, LEGO acted like anime didn’t exist. Star Wars, sure. Marvel, absolutely. Batman, SpongeBob, even the Titanic, all fair game. But anime sat in a weird blind spot for decades, despite fans on LEGO Ideas practically begging for a shot at Naruto, Totoro, or literally anything with a Kamehameha wave in it. Then One Piece happened in 2025, technically through Netflix’s live action version rather than the actual anime, and the door creaked open just enough for people to start hoping.

Enter tulodici, a LEGO Ideas builder who decided to test exactly how far that door swings with a full brick-built Super Saiyan Goku. It is dramatic, it is articulated within an inch of its life, and it uses a hair building trick borrowed from LEGO’s botanical sets, which is the kind of crossover I did not know I needed. Whether Bandai and Toei ever let this happen is a different question. But the build itself deserves the spotlight regardless.

Designer: tulodici

The build recreates Goku’s Namek transformation scene, mid Kamehameha charge, standing on a cracked chunk of alien terrain with translucent yellow aura shards erupting around his feet. It runs 1,064 pieces, and tulodici notes almost everything used is already in production, only eight colors would need to be newly molded, which is a genuinely reasonable ask by LEGO Ideas standards. The whole figure is built on ball and turntable joints, so it holds a proper dynamic fighting stance rather than the stiff, glued-in-place look a lot of big display figures fall into.

My favorite detail, though, is the hair. Anime hair is notoriously the hardest thing to replicate in bricks, all sharp angles and gravity defying spikes, and tulodici solved it by clipping yellow wedge pieces onto two stacked steering wheel elements, a technique he pulled from LEGO’s modern botanical plant sets. It is a smart piece of cross pollination, using a flower-building trick to fake spiky hair texture while keeping the whole thing structurally sound underneath. Elsewhere, spoiler pieces form the Turtle School gi’s shoulder pads without restricting arm movement, and mudguard pieces shape the boots. There is even a companion minifigure with a display stand and swappable hair, black for base Goku, yellow for Super Saiyan, so you can flex between forms depending on your mood that day.

As tulodici puts it, “turning this set into reality is going to take OVER 9000 supporters,” which, yes, is the joke you think it is, and I respect the commitment to the bit.

The bigger question is whether LEGO would ever greenlight this even with the votes. Dragon Ball’s license sits with Bandai and Toei, a much tougher door than the Netflix deal that got One Piece through. For context, Naruto’s Ichiraku Ramen build cleared 10,000 supporters and got pushed to LEGO’s Parking Lot stage this year, while two Avatar: The Last Airbender projects hit the same milestone and got rejected outright. So the votes matter, but they are not the whole battle.

Right now this Goku sits at 917 supporters with 405 days left to hit the first 1,000 milestone. If you want to see Namek rendered in ABS plastic, head over to the LEGO Ideas page and give it your vote.

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This LEGO Phoenix’s Talons Actually Grip the Perch, and It’s Weirdly Convincing

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LEGO’s official phoenix, the 597-piece Fawkes from the Harry Potter line, does one trick. You turn a crank at the back and the wings flap up and down, forever, in the same arc, like a very committed but slightly limited stage performer. It’s a lovely little set and it looks great on a shelf, but the bird has exactly one thing it can do, and it will do that one thing until the end of time or until you stop turning the handle, whichever comes first.

Swas has taken a different approach on LEGO Ideas. His Blazing Phoenix doesn’t animate, it poses, which turns out to be the better idea for a creature this dramatic. Photograph it upright and it’s regal. Sweep the wings forward and drop the head and it’s about to ruin someone’s afternoon.

Designer: Swas

The wings are where the engineering flexes hardest. Each one runs off a Technic spine with visible pin and axle connections at the root and mid-span, and that hidden skeleton is what lets the whole assembly hold a pose instead of flopping. Four or five overlapping feather ranks are shingled per wing, small scalloped coverts near the shoulder giving way to long individually mounted primaries at the tips that actually fan and separate rather than sitting as one flat slab. Bright yellow stripes run along the length of each feather like flame traveling outward from the body, which is a genuinely smart color call and does more storytelling than the shape alone ever could.

The tail gets the same individual-feather treatment, a long fan of striped blades that either gathers low behind the perch or spreads wide depending on the pose you land on. Every feather looks independently mounted, so the tail reads as one more articulating surface rather than a fixed decorative wedge bolted on as an afterthought.

The head is where the personality lives, and also where my favorite detail is hiding. The beak transitions from bright orange into yellow with a nicely hooked profile, and above the eye Swas has used a small red feathered wing piece as a stand-in eyebrow. That’s the kind of part repurpose that separates builders who are just following a shape from builders who understand how a face actually reads.

Down at the perch, the legs are jointed at hip, knee, and ankle, bending the correct backward-bird way, ending in curved nougat talons that genuinely wrap around the rail instead of resting near it. Swas says the claws grasp, and looking at the renders, that’s not a marketing line, the grip looks load-bearing.

Swas has said the phoenix stuck with him since his teenage years, when the fantasy novels he was reading collided with the mythological stories his grandmother used to tell, and the message that every end is a new beginning is one he still carries around. That’s a nice thing to build a thousand-plus bricks around.

The Blazing Phoenix just crossed 1,000 supporters and is now working toward the 5,000 mark, with 591 days left on the clock. If a poseable, fully articulated phoenix sounds better to you than one that only knows a single flap, head over to LEGO Ideas and give it your vote.

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LEGO x Nike Air Force 1 is set for take-off with a 360° dunking minifig onboard

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LEGO and Nike are back with their new themed set. This time it’s the Air Force 1 Space-Themed Building Set that seems en route to orbit and beyond, leaving nothing but its exhaust plume behind. If you’ve been following, this is not the first such collaborative model. LEGO x Nike started their collaboration of kicks, bricks, and a whole lot of fan love with the co-branded Nike Dunk x LEGO Set.

Since then, the inspiring duo has not looked back. Giving sneakerheads, builders, and those who live in the spirit of basketball, a new set with playful details almost every year. Ideal for kids aged 9+ and adults alike, over the years, Nike Slam Dunk and the Nike Dunk Trickshot, the bright yellow Air Max Dn, and the iconic Air Max 95 LEGO sets have swayed us big time, and now the AF1 is here with similar intention.

Designer: LEGO x NikeLEGO x Nike

The LEGO x Nike Air Force 1 building set was officially announced with its first look on the LEGO website just recently. A nod to the Nike Air Force 1 sneaker, first launched in 1982, the set comprises 1,093 pieces and measures over 10.5 inches high, 14 inches wide and 4 inches deep. Alongside the sneaker, the interactive set features other antics to make it really interesting to see and fun to build. The space-themed build has the basketball sneaker as the highlight, but it shares base with kinetic display elements that are, of course, an eminent part of the build.

The Air Force 1 itself, ready for launch, comes in a clean white colorway with an orange Swoosh logo. The Swoosh is removable and replaceable with a silver logo, which resembles the heel collar ascent of the sneaker. The set, as mentioned, is not about the sneaker alone. Assembled on a base with traction patterns resembling the Air Force 1 outsole, it is centered around a large blue-colored AF1 sign.

The basketball setting on the base is made interesting with a LEGO spaceman minifigure, with Nike styling, mounted onto a mechanical rig and stationed on the AF1 sign with a basketball hoop just in the front. The minifigure features an interchangeable head and is attached to an integrated dial, which can be turned to let the minifig pull off one of the most difficult basketball moves. It can do a full 360-degree dunk by spinning mid-air before slamming the ball through the hoop.

An eye-pleasing conglomeration in white, blue and yellow, this LEGO x Nike Air Force 1 set will begin shipping from September 1, 2026. It will be available through LEGO for $100; a price point that should push you to get this streetwear decor for your desk, shelf, or bedside table.

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Someone Built a LEGO Bedside Radio With 1,400 Bricks And Inner Circuitry

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Remember when clock radios had personality? Before phones ate every function a bedside table used to need, you had this chunky little box with dials that clicked, buttons that thunked, and a display that glowed just enough to bug you at 3am. That exact vibe is what 91-Brickdesigns set out to capture with the Legosonic BSR-12, a LEGO Ideas build modeled on the radio alarm clocks that ruled nightstands in the late 70s and early 80s. And they didn’t just nail the look, they nailed the fidgetiness of the thing too.

Around 1400 pieces went into this build, and a big chunk of that count is doing unnecessary, delightful work. The toggle switches have actual spring mechanisms so they click when you flip them. The sliders drive a gear underneath just so they feel smoother in your hand, despite doing literally nothing. Even the snooze button is a running joke, since pressing it accomplishes exactly zero. It’s the kind of overbuilt charm we loved in the LEGO Classics Computer a while back, cranked up another notch.

Designer: 91-Brickdesigns

The front panel alone is a lot to take in. You’ve got three round dials up top that turn but don’t actually control anything, a row of colored indicator lights, and a genuinely functional time-set system where you spin the big dial and lock it in with a couple of chrome buttons. Next to that sits a flip clock style display frozen at 20:58, glowing like it just woke up from a nap, and a tuning window with a red needle you can slide across a fake FM and AM band using a little wheel on the side. None of it plays actual music, but every piece of it looks like it should.

Pop the top cover and there’s a full circuit board hiding under there, with brick built resistors color coded the way real resistors are, a couple of capacitors, and a chip sitting exactly where you’d expect one on an actual PCB. Slide the ventilation grille open and there’s a speaker cone waiting behind it. Flip the whole thing around and the back has a proper spec plate, an AC input, and an on off switch that wouldn’t look out of place on a real appliance from a Best Buy circa 1983. My favorite detail might be the plate itself, which reads “Made in Two Tiles, Legany,” because apparently even fictional radio manufacturers deserve a pun.

This isn’t the first time we’ve watched builders chase this exact strain of nostalgia. The JVC pyramid TV that hit LEGO Ideas earlier this year leaned on the same appeal, and LEGO’s own Icons Retro Radio proved there’s real demand for gadgets that remind adults of a time when electronics had weight and character instead of just a glass slab and a charging port. The Legosonic BSR-12 fits right into that lineage, except it goes further than most by building the guts as carefully as the shell.

The build currently sits at Staff Pick status with 589 days left to hit its 5,000 supporter mark, on the way to the 10,000 votes needed for LEGO’s official review. If you’re the kind of person who misses a nightstand that made noise when you touched it, head over to LEGO Ideas and give it a vote.

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LEGO Shrinks Hogwarts to 700 Bricks, Keeps the Chamber of Secrets

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Every LEGO Hogwarts has to decide what to leave out. The 2018 71043 kept nearly everything and asked for two feet of shelf in return. The 76419 microscale version kept the grounds, the Black Lake, and the Whomping Willow, and still needed 13.5 inches across. Mini Hogwarts Castle (40975) gets 6.5 inches, total, and somehow still finds room for the Great Hall, the Main Tower, the East Wing, and the Astronomy Tower.

Then it goes further – lift the East Wing and the Chamber of Secrets is sitting underneath. There is a second concealed room holding the Mirror of Erised. LEGO built basements into a model roughly the size of a coffee mug. This thing would genuinely fit in the cupboard under the stairs, which sounds like an inside joke but also sort of feels like a design brief somebody at LEGO actually considered.

Designer: LEGO

The whole thing runs on 700 pieces, which sounds like a lot, but once you actually look at them, the size starts to make sense. This is a build made almost entirely out of 1×1 and 1×2 elements, the tiny stuff that buys you texture and silhouette instead of volume. Every stud is doing double duty here. It is the LEGO equivalent of packing for a weekend trip with a backpack instead of a suitcase: technically everything fits, you just had to get clever about it.

Harry shows up as a full-size, regular minifigure, flying over the castle on his broom with Hedwig in tow, and the scale math immediately breaks. He is basically eye level with the Astronomy Tower. This is either a continuity error or the most honest thing LEGO has ever built, because it turns out putting a normal-sized wizard kid anywhere near Hogwarts was always going to look a little unhinged. LEGO has played this hybrid-scale card before, most recently with this year’s Minas Tirith, where a microscale city cracks open into a minifigure-scale throne room. Mini Hogwarts is running a cheaper, weirder version of the same bit, and honestly it works, mostly because nobody expected them to try.

Even in its tiny avatar, the entire thing is proportional, and more importantly, color accurate. Grey roofs, beige stone architecture, the castle’s familiar silhouette rendered in shorthand rather than detail. You are not meant to stare at brick texture on this one. You are meant to recognize it from across the room in about half a second, the same way you would clock Hogwarts from a two-second trailer clip.

Mini Hogwarts Castle launches August 29 for $39.99, and it is not launching alone. That same day, LEGO Insiders get early access to 76476 The Ministry of Magic Collectors’ Edition, a 3,491-piece, 20-inch beast built to mark 25 years since Philosopher’s Stone hit theaters. Same franchise, same anniversary, same Tuesday, and two sets that could not be more different if they tried. One needs a dedicated shelf and a weekend off work. The other needs a corner of your desk and maybe forty minutes. Somewhere between those two extremes is basically the entire pitch of the Wizarding World lineup in 2026, and I have to respect a company that ships both on the same morning.

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LEGO Fan Recreates Jeff Koons’ Iconic Balloon Dog In Just 1,026 Bricks

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LEGO already makes a balloon dog. It’s part 35692, it’s about the size of a fingernail, and it shows up as an accessory in carnival and fairground sets so your minifigs have something to hold at the fun fair. It’s charming and completely forgettable, the sort of piece that lives in the bottom of the tub with the croissants and the tiny frying pans.

brxstr looked at that and asked the reasonable follow-up question: why is there no big one? Balloon Dog Mk II is his answer, a 1,026-piece display model in classic glossy red that scales the gag up to 15 inches long and 12.5 inches tall. And in a move I genuinely love, four of the original tiny balloon dogs are hidden inside the finished build, mounted on a wall like lab specimens. More on that in a moment, because the inside of this thing runs on a completely different sense of humor from the outside.

Designer: brxstr

The entire model hinges on one part. Piece 5274, the 8x6x2 curved windscreen, only arrived in the LEGO palette around 2024, and brxstr scrapped an earlier version of this MOC (My Own Creation) to rebuild from scratch once he had it. Two of them mirrored together form a single balloon segment, and every lobe on the dog, the nose, the ears, the barrel body, the four legs, comes from that same trick. The tapered tips get a smaller rounded windscreen to close them off. Technic angled elements do the connecting work inside, hidden entirely, which is the part that took the patience. Hiding structure is harder than building it.

What sells the illusion is something he probably didn’t plan. Along each lobe you can see dashed dark seams where plate edges meet, and rather than reading as sloppy tolerance, they look exactly like the crease lines you get on over-inflated latex. Free realism. The flared nozzle at the front of the nose is my favorite single piece here, one small element doing the entire job of saying “this was blown up by a person.”

Then you lift the top of the body off. Inside sits a minifig in a yellow hazmat suit, radiation warning on his chest, standing over a trans-blue gas cylinder with a chrome pipe feeding in from a printed gauge panel, a valve wheel on the opposite wall, and those four tiny balloon dogs racked up behind him. A second minifig sits in the head, steering. It’s the funniest thing about the build, because the exterior is so serene and the interior suggests the dog is a pressurized industrial vessel operated by two guys.

Two parts, the tapered end pieces and the round 6×6 bricks in the head and tail, don’t currently exist in red, which is a small ask. brxstr has floated other colorways and even a multicolored version, and honestly I want the full clown-cart rainbow. The build sits at 906 supporters with 423 days on the clock, so head to the LEGO Ideas page and give it a vote.

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Michelangelo’s iconic David bust gets recreated in LEGO, turning plastic into sculpted marble

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If you ever took a drawing class, you have met this face. Art schools spent about two centuries buying plaster casts of David’s head and parking them on shelves so students could sit there for six hours learning to render a nostril. The Victoria and Albert Museum owns a full size cast of the whole statue, and famously kept a plaster fig leaf on standby in case Queen Victoria dropped by and needed the shock absorbed. So David has been getting copied, shrunk, cast, and occasionally censored for a very long time. Turning him into a toy is not the sacrilege it sounds like. It’s basically the family business.

Which brings us to Ysien, a LEGO Ideas builder who decided the next material in that lineage should be ABS plastic. The build renders David’s head, neck, shoulders and upper chest as a classical bust, entirely in white, sitting on a proper stepped pedestal. No color, no minifigure, no cheeky accessories. Just light and shadow doing all the work, exactly like the plaster casts it descends from.

Designer: Ysien

The hair is the whole reason this MOC (My Own Creation) works. Hair is where sculptors get found out, because faces have anatomy underneath that you can reason your way through, while hair is a mass of overlapping nothing that somehow has to read as soft. Michelangelo’s answer was a tangle of deep drilled curls. Ysien’s answer is a genuinely absurd stack of curved slopes and half arch elements layered at varying depths, so each curl throws its own little shadow instead of flattening into texture. “The hair was one of the greatest challenges, with each curl contributing to the overall silhouette, depth, rhythm, and movement,” he says, which is a very polite way of describing what must have been several evenings of quiet suffering.

My favorite decision, though, is that the seams stay visible. Ysien could have chased a smooth marble finish and lost, because bricks do not do smooth. Instead he let the geometry become part of the sculpture, so the thing reads as a portrait from across the room and as unmistakable LEGO up close. The eyes get a similar treatment, built from inverted round elements that give David that vacant classical stare, which is a nice accident given the real statue has heart shaped pupils drilled into it. Monochrome white does the rest, forcing every bit of the anatomy to be described by shadow alone. There’s no piece count listed yet, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the high hundreds.

Ysien’s David is currently sitting at just over 400 supporters with 424 days on the clock, which means there is a long road to the 10,000 votes that trigger an official LEGO review. LEGO Ideas is where fan builds get their shot at becoming retail sets, and this one deserves a look. The only thing I’d add is a black variant, because a basalt David would be an absolute menace on a shelf. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote!

The post Michelangelo’s iconic David bust gets recreated in LEGO, turning plastic into sculpted marble first appeared on Yanko Design.

Michelangelo’s iconic David bust gets recreated in LEGO, turning plastic into sculpted marble

Posted on by

If you ever took a drawing class, you have met this face. Art schools spent about two centuries buying plaster casts of David’s head and parking them on shelves so students could sit there for six hours learning to render a nostril. The Victoria and Albert Museum owns a full size cast of the whole statue, and famously kept a plaster fig leaf on standby in case Queen Victoria dropped by and needed the shock absorbed. So David has been getting copied, shrunk, cast, and occasionally censored for a very long time. Turning him into a toy is not the sacrilege it sounds like. It’s basically the family business.

Which brings us to Ysien, a LEGO Ideas builder who decided the next material in that lineage should be ABS plastic. The build renders David’s head, neck, shoulders and upper chest as a classical bust, entirely in white, sitting on a proper stepped pedestal. No color, no minifigure, no cheeky accessories. Just light and shadow doing all the work, exactly like the plaster casts it descends from.

Designer: Ysien

The hair is the whole reason this MOC (My Own Creation) works. Hair is where sculptors get found out, because faces have anatomy underneath that you can reason your way through, while hair is a mass of overlapping nothing that somehow has to read as soft. Michelangelo’s answer was a tangle of deep drilled curls. Ysien’s answer is a genuinely absurd stack of curved slopes and half arch elements layered at varying depths, so each curl throws its own little shadow instead of flattening into texture. “The hair was one of the greatest challenges, with each curl contributing to the overall silhouette, depth, rhythm, and movement,” he says, which is a very polite way of describing what must have been several evenings of quiet suffering.

My favorite decision, though, is that the seams stay visible. Ysien could have chased a smooth marble finish and lost, because bricks do not do smooth. Instead he let the geometry become part of the sculpture, so the thing reads as a portrait from across the room and as unmistakable LEGO up close. The eyes get a similar treatment, built from inverted round elements that give David that vacant classical stare, which is a nice accident given the real statue has heart shaped pupils drilled into it. Monochrome white does the rest, forcing every bit of the anatomy to be described by shadow alone. There’s no piece count listed yet, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the high hundreds.

Ysien’s David is currently sitting at just over 400 supporters with 424 days on the clock, which means there is a long road to the 10,000 votes that trigger an official LEGO review. LEGO Ideas is where fan builds get their shot at becoming retail sets, and this one deserves a look. The only thing I’d add is a black variant, because a basalt David would be an absolute menace on a shelf. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote!

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