Beautiful LEGO®

by Mike Doyle

Overview

Mix hundreds of thousands of LEGO bricks with dozens of artists, and what do you get? Beautiful LEGO, a compendium of LEGO artwork that showcases a stunning array of pieces ranging from incredibly lifelike replicas of everyday objects and famous monuments to imaginative renderings of spaceships, mansions, and mythical creatures.

You’ll also meet the minds behind the art. Interviews with the artists take you inside the creative process that turns simple, plastic bricks into remarkable LEGO masterpieces.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781593275440
Publisher:	No Starch Press
Publication date:	10/13/2013
Series:	Beautiful LEGO Series , #1
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	94 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Mike Doyle is an internationally acclaimed LEGO artist and known for his stunningly realistic, grand-scale designs. His award-winning Abandoned House series has been showcased at Gallery1988 in LA and Boston’s Museum of Realist Art. His largest piece to date is Contact I—a 6×6-foot masterwork built from more than 200,000 LEGO elements. When not constructing LEGO art, Doyle works as a graphic designer. He lives with his wife and two children in New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: Ramón and Amador Alfaro Marcilla
Chapter 2: Mmmmm
Chapter 3: Everyday Wonderful
Chapter 4: Attic Treasures
Chapter 5: Jordan Schwartz
Chapter 6: CubeDudes
Chapter 7: Go Ask Alice
Chapter 8: Nathan Sawaya
Chapter 9: Monsters, Aliens, and Creatures
Chapter 10: Tweets
Chapter 11: Plastic Menagerie
Chapter 12: Mike Nieves
Chapter 13: Quite the Character
Chapter 14: All Dolled Up
Chapter 15: Arthur Gugick
Chapter 16: Mike Doyle
Chapter 17: Urban Planning
Chapter 18: Nannan Zhang
Chapter 19: Mosaics
Chapter 20: On the Road
Chapter 21: Lino Martins
Chapter 22: Mecha
Chapter 23: The Final Frontier
Chapter 24: Striders
Chapter 25: MicroBots
Chapter 26: Meta
Chapter 27: Bad Days
Chapter 28: Iain Heath
Chapter 29: Pythonscape
Chapter 30: Faraway Lands
Contributors

Editorial Reviews

09/09/2013
Legos have been a building block of childhoods around the world for decades (the Danish company, the Lego Group, was founded in 1949), but as graphic designer Doyle demonstrates in this impressive collection of 360 Lego models, they’re far from child’s play. The book showcases the work of 77 artists, who offer a wildly divergent results: from portraits of Freddie Mercury and the monsters from Alien to dissected frogs, space stations, and chromed-out hot rods. Though Doyle humbly waits until the middle of the book to showcase a few of his own sculptures, they are among the most striking. His stark black-and-white renderings of an elegant Victorian house damaged by an uprooted tree, as well as the book’s cover (a massive futuristic city with countless spires) are nothing short of breathtaking. Brief bios of the creators accompany each entry, with the artists discussing what drew them to Lego bricks and their approach to design. One featured artist, Jordan Schwartz, may have achieved the ultimate goal: landing a job at Lego as a product designer due in part to his creations. Surprisingly, the book doesn’t include specifications such as the dimensions of the pieces or the number of bricks used, nor are there images of works-in-progress. If readers can forgive that, they will be mesmerized by this astonishing collection. Full-color illus. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Far from child’s play. An astonishing collection."
—Publishers Weekly

"A stunning array."
—Today.com

"One man's quest to prove LEGO can be art."
—The Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

01/01/2014
Contributors to this volume elevate LEGO construction to an art form. For these 80 builders, many of whom are self-admitted geeks, ambitious builds provide the perfect balance of technical challenge, problem-solving, and creativity. The LEGO block also has appeal as a recyclable medium owing to its precise manufacturing standard since 1958. The selection here is curated by Doyle, a graphic designer and LEGO artist known for his 200,000-brick fantasy cityscape Contact I as well as models of abandoned, deteriorating Victorian houses. The results of his worldwide call yielded a variety of online submissions, including works of architecture, fantasy worlds, monsters, and robots, ranging from simple figures pared down to their essence to technically complex and intricately detailed naturalistic figures. Doyle has enhanced the images for publication in print, retouching the figures and adding backgrounds. He provides brief biographical interviews for several of the best-known artists to reveal their beginnings, inspirations, and artistic challenges. VERDICT Fans of LEGO building will find inspiration in this volume, and others will be astonished by the surprising, fun creations.—Nancy B. Turner, Syracuse Univ. Lib., NY

Library Journal