How can you make a bunch of square bricks look round? Or oval for that matter? And how exactly do you make them to look like a dinosaur or the face of your favorite uncle? Does this ever happen? Well, hardly ever if you look at them one at a time. The trick is using them in just the right combinations to make them appear to take on rounded, oval, or other more organic shapes. That is the idea behind sculpting with LEGO bricks.
Sculpting is different from other forms of building with LEGO bricks, in that your primary goal is often to simply re-create a specific shape or series of shapes in the most realistic way possible. You can argue that the macro bricks in Chapter 5 are sculptures, and you aren’t wrong. But in those cases, the models are based on simple geometry and mathematics. Sculptured models also use those things, but they require a little more of your eye and judgment to make them successful. A sculptured model can be something as obvious as a sphere (perhaps a globe of the earth) or a sphere-like shape that you work into a larger model. You can take the techniques you learn from making spheres and use them to create the head of a large-scale minifig, an animal figure, or even part of a certain building or vehicle.
In this chapter, I’ll first walk you through the principles behind creating a basic sphere like the one shown in Figure 7-1. Then, I’ll take those lessons and apply them to another situation where the curved natural shapes proved useful.
The first sphere you build doesn’t need to be enormous in order for you to learn the techniques necessary to create it. The one shown in Figure 7-1 is only 16 studs wide and 13 bricks high. It’s just a little larger than a typical softball.
Figure 7-1. This sphere is modeled in three different colors. You can pick a color scheme like this, use just a single color, or change colors at each layer.
In this section, you’ll build a very basic sphere. You can create one using nothing more than standard bricks—no plates, slopes, or other special elements are required.
A sphere is really just another word for a ball-shaped object. One of the best things about a basic sphere is that you can build one with just the bricks you’ll find in a bucket of assorted bricks. You can also make your first sphere just about any size you want, depending on how many bricks you want to use. The method for producing the rounded look of the sphere remains the same if you’re building one the size of a softball or one as big as a basketball.
The degree to which you can make a LEGO globe or ball appear spherical depends mostly upon how big you build it and how many small plates you add to the mixture of parts. The larger it is, the more rounded it is likely to appear. By using more plates, to fill some of the square corners, you can also add to the circular appearance. For the example in this chapter, I’m going on the assumption that you don’t have a huge number of small plates, so you’re going to build a sphere using just bricks. It will end up looking like Figure 7-2.
Figure 7-2. The goal. This simple sphere contains only 220 bricks, but you can use the same technique to make ones that are much larger.
As you can see, using full-height bricks alone gives you a somewhat blocky looking sphere. For this example, however, the goal isn’t to create a perfectly smooth ball, but rather to demonstrate the technique. First, take a look at the Bill of Materials for this project (Figure 7-3).
Figure 7-3. Bill of Materials for a basic sphere. This design uses common bricks and not even a lot of them!
The pieces you need to make a small sphere, like the one you’re creating in this chapter, are very common and should be within the reach of even a modest-sized LEGO collection.