On Legos and Java

Last week, I had a sudden urge to create a Lego mecha. Every few years, I have a bit of a Lego revival, and pull out the old bins and just build. A lot. I'm a fan of those crazy builders out there who make the most interesting sculptures with legos, such as can be seen at FoundryDX and bricklovinfreakboy's Flickr photosets. This time around, I was inspired by my cousin's son, Zach, who loves playing with Legos. I can't wait to show this to him when he comes over next time. I worked with a lot of older pieces, some from sets that I got when I was only five years old or so. I had to get really creative with it, since I don't have an unlimited amount of pieces. I had to make it a bit asymmetrical in color or shape in a few places. I probably could have made the arms mirror images, but I wanted to do one with a claw anyways, so I made them more individualized. What made this creation possible was the Bionicle set I got in my stocking last Xmas. I combined old and new, and drew references from old Japanese super robot shows, and my own imagination. It was a time for creativity, inventiveness, nostalgia, geeky laughter, and the incessant "swish, crash!" of my sifting through the Lego bins. After several hours of building, I had this behemoth completed. It has a cool detachable jet-wing backpack, a gun with a working peep-sight which the left hand can actually grip, and a lot of accurate articulation (meaning the range of the joints are the same as ours). I set up a little photography table using my mom's lights, table, ladder, paper, tape, etc., which she uses on her painting projects. I set my camera on my new Ultrapod, a tripod from REI, and snapped away. It was tough to pose this guy, because it is a bit heavier than the joints can bear, unless one is careful with it. After I edited the photos to remove breaks in the paper backdrop, I used a cool freeware program called Jalbum to compile them into a cool photo album, saving me a lot of time in html coding, and/or a lot of space on my blog. Go check it out to see ten more views of this mech of mine. Well, now it's on to the next project!