A couple of weeks ago I got an interesting assignment from an old client of mine. I had made illustrations for them in the past but this time they wanted a series of photographs made with Lego figures. One of the photos would have to deal with the future of employment, for which I would have to build a Lego robot. Encouraged by the recent flow of tiny Lego robots here and there, most notably this fab little critter from Mike Stimpson, I accepted the challenge.
I saved the robot photograph to the last of the batch, because eventually I was intimidated by this part of the assignment. After procrastinating too long on the subject matter I decided to just look for instructions online. I found some pretty nice instructions (this is the original, I think), but I didn’t want to build anything as such. I needed to personalize my robot, and for that I had to jump in the deep waters of creative building.
I used the core structure of the build I had found, but changed some parts here and there using what we already had at home. The robot had to have an eye, so I planted a big red one in the middle of it’s face. The arms and legs were square in the instructions, I changed them to cylindrical bricks to create a feel of hydraulic pistons for limbs. A couple of silver bricks came up while looking for parts, I added those along with pincher hands and other doodads. After a short while, voilà, a robot was born:
Not really a MOC this one, I admit, but I had fun.
The assignment for the client went well and the robot did what it was built to do. But this thing needs to be put to a test, I want to see how it stands on it’s own in a photograph. Some day soon.
I will call this guy “Brubaker”.
Full time illustrator, part time photographer. As such, I created blizzards with Star Wars Lego and had an influence on how The Lego Movie looks like.
That robot looks great! He reminds me somehow HAL from 2001 a Space Odyssey with the big red eye.
Thanks! I’m glad you pointed out the resemblance to HAL, it’s a good catch. I had two choices for the eye, red and light blue/turquoise. Once I tried the red on, and realized what it looked like, I happily settled for that. I figured if anyone made the connection in the photograph I made for the client, it would only make it better. It was about the robot labour of the future after all. :)