I hope you all had a nice Christmas…mine was (and still is) filled with Lego, my son got rather a lot of it. Yes, I got some too, but mostly I was building my son’s Ninjago sets. Ninjago, as you can imagine, is all about Lego Ninjas and all that stuff. Lego is so complicated these days, full of tiny little pieces fitting together in intricate and specific fashions. You almost have to be a molecular physicist to build the sets these days. And it’s GREAT! This particular beauty is the Samurai Mech, a large robot type thing piloted by a little Samurai called Nya, or something. It took ages to build, hours. While building I had no idea what piece I was constructing but it all comes together nicely. My son opened this one on Christmas Eve, and I spent much time after he went to bed building it, while we watched Love Actually (a movie we last saw at the cinema in London a decade ago). I drew this in the Stillman and Birn Alpha book, and there are many more to draw.
Tag: lego
ninjago red fire mech
It’s all about the ninjas these days. This is a ‘Ninjago’ red ninja fire mech, oh yes it is. What exactly that is I’m not quite sure; the Ninjago world is something a little beyond me, though the boy is watching enough cartoons (“Masters of Spinjitsu”, I kid ye not) this week to give me an education. This is what all the kids are into now. You have to be careful not to plan too far ahead at Christmas time, not get too many things on the original list, because the list changes fast and there are all new things to add. All the endless ads and target catalogs don’t help, but mostly it’s guided by the trends in the kindergarten playground. Next week it’ll be something different. I remember being that age – it was all Star Wars, no Battlestar Galactica, no Mr Men, no Hammer House of Horror (honestly, we played that more than anything at our school).
Right now, Lego is the main thing, the super-hero sets mostly but now it’s Ninjago that fires the imagination. Kids love ninjas. I remember when the Turtles first appeared, a little bit after my time to be into them, but in England they weren’t called ‘Ninja’ Turtles. The were the “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles”. Ninja was deemed too violent a word or concept. Eventually that changed. Ninjago is just Ninjago, but with added whole-point-is-to-sell-more-toy-sets commercialism which the kids lap up. So do the adults, they enjoy looking for and buying all these things every bit as much, don’t tell me they don’t. My son, he’s at the age where he really enjoys building the Lego sets from the instructions now, all those tiny little pieces. Lego is different from when I was a lad, smaller, more complicated, lose one miniscule piece and basically the whole thing may not work. I like to build them too, but mostly I like to draw them. This is another entry the sketchbook of in my son’s stuff, a Stillman & Birn Alpha book.
i love it when a lego bat-ship comes together
I have been doing some sketching lately, but I’ve been very busy that I’ve not been scanning it all in. Here is something I drew recently though, another of my son’s toys, a Lego bat-vehicle. It’s all about the Lego now, and I mean the tiny little pieces sort of Lego, with lots of complicated instructions. Lego is great, but blocks are so much smaller than in my day! Especially when they are all over the carpet. Maybe I’m just bigger.
Drawn in a Stillman and Birn Alpha book in ink and watercolour.
its sculptor well those passions read
#25 of 30. Nearly there folks! Yes this is lego. Baby-lego. Since my son got them, I have regained my incredible lego building skills. I’m not an architect, but I am certainly a legotect, and can build any manner of planes, trains and space-rockets with the stuff.
The British Museum…Yes, I did a bit of Interactive Theatre years ago, I was really into it, running some performance-and-games-based workshops, using the methods of Ali Campbell, the brilliant guy who taught me, and Augusto Boal, the brilliant guy who taught him (and father of the art). It’s something I was good at, but never did get back into. Anyhow, the Hidden Histories project was a major eye-opener; a series of workshops with inspirational performers from Shape Arts, a disability arts organisation in London, culminating in an abstract promenade performance among the statues, ruins and spectators of the Greek rooms in the British Museum. We were told (and it might even be true) that it was one of the first (if not the first) time the British Museum had been used to host performance art. It was themed around the histories that are hidden not only in the statues and stones, but also in the people you pass every day, able-bodied and disabled. One thing I learnt was that a lot of the people we were calling disabled were a great deal more able in so many ways than most able-bodied people. I was involved with a few other projects with the Shape performers but this one was the most educational, and most fun.
As did the others, I kept a journal to document the process – not full of the sort of drawings I do now, but cartoony diagrammy stuff, notes, quotes, scribbles, quibbles. The journals were in fact displayed at the British Museum on the days of the performances, down in the education centre. I even made little plasticine figures to represent one segment of the performance. I recall, in the wine reception after the main show (and the press were there), a woman was browsing the journals and was spending a lot of time looking at my one, and she asked me (not knowing it was mine) how old the children were that made these. “Well that child was twenty-five,” I said. I was elated.
petescully 