The Lego is very far from being done with yet. Plenty more the draw…it’s addicting, to make, to draw, all of it. We’ve even decided to go to Legoland – the one in California, not the original one in Billund which I always wanted go to. I know there’s one outside London now at Windsor, where the old Windsor Safari Park used to be, presumably the Lego monkeys don’t climb all over your car and nick your windscreen wipers. This excquisite piece of action Lego is the Avengers Quinjet, which you’ll recognize if you’re a fan of Marvel comic book movies. This was a big set, and took a few hours to build. Highl;y enjoyable as well. That’s the deadly Black Widow flying the plane there, and to the right is the villainous trickster Loki, riding on an alien chariot driven by a ‘sorry Chitauri’ – you’ll understand that phrase if you, as we have done, have watched the Lego Marvel ‘Maximum Overload’ cartoon. The great thing about fathering a six year old boy is you get total justification to do and buy all of this stuff (“oh, it’s for my son…”). Who am I kidding, I was like it before, I’m just…more so now. And all this Lego is the best.
Tag: toys
plastic people
Lego. Everything is awesome. We very much live in a Lego Universe right now. Kipling couldn’t have put it better. “If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs…” I’ve been spending a fair bit of time drawing much of my son’s Lego (and some of it is mine – see Boba Fett and Magneto, naturally) which is nearly as much fun as building the stuff. Here are a load of the figures, which as any parent knows are way more important than the vehicles or dragons or giant robots they come with (except for the giant robots). There is a mixture of super-heroes and super-villains (both Marvel and DC, though Superman and Wonder-Woman have since been added to this collection), plus several of the Ninjago ninjas, plus a few other characters including Emmet from the Lego Movie you may have seen recently (it’s awesome, yes, if a little visually crazy, and it looks like my living room floor). I’ve included some of the accessories in this picture, Ninja swords and so on, and you may notice a little Wolverine-claws piece near the bottom. Sadly Wolverine himself was lost, we don’t know where (you know how Logan likes to just skip town), but his claws were left behind. I hope we find him. Big robots don’t just rip themselves apart, you know. Incidentally, did you see the last Wolverine movie? I really enjoyed it, Logan’s adventures in Japan. My wife pointed out though that despite his famous catchphrase, he definitely isn’t the best there is at what he does, because he’s actually not all that as a fighter: always getting shot or stabbed or cut, relying on his mutant healing factor and his adamantium-coated skeleton to get him out of trouble. It’s like saying, yeah I’m brilliant at chess, as long as every time you take one of my pieces I can just go back and do that move again. No, that ain’t how you learn. Still, all said and done, you’d still want Wolverine on your side, bub.
go go power rangers
More toys documented. These scary plastic looking things all have something to do with Power Rangers. Above are the Power Rangers Samurai swords; the top one makes noises and the weird golden head thing spins around. The one below it has a detachable plastic sword blade that is all bent out of shape from defeating bad guys and monsters. Have you ever seen Power Rangers? In all of its many iterations it is completely barmy. I remember when my nephews back in the mid-90s would watch it, and it made zero sense to me then with its hammy delivery and terrible rubbery bad-guy costumes (and as for the cheap-looking pound-shop toy design of the big robot things, zords or zoids or whatever they are). And as for the dialogue, its either all “Go Go Mega Blast! Blah Blah Zap Power Robo Blast Batteries Not Included!” or its the cheesy teenagers sitting around with concerned faces saying “we’re here for you if you want to talk about your feelings,” nonsense. Yeah, with Netflix and Xfinity on-demand we have many different seasons on our TV each day. And then there are the storybooks, which make as much sense as the shows. Give me the Ninjago any day.
But the boy loves it, and that’s the main thing. The creepy plastic face below is a Gosei Power Morpher (of course it is, you couldn’t guess?) into which you place various cards that make it say specific Power-Ranger phrases; in the show they ‘morph’ the heroes into the Power Rangers.
“jump up, kick back, whip around and spin”
That confusing sounding title comes from the theme tune of Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitsu, a show that my six-year-old son absolutely loves. Which means of course I have to love as well, and I’m fine with that. Admittedly I couldn’t figure out those lyrics on my own; I had to actually google them, to get it right and not look the inevitable fool. That’s how it is when you’re a dad, you get to be immersed in the culture of being a six-year-old (as opposed to the rest of my time, spent reading comics, watching football and Star Wars and drawing pictures of Iron Man and Magneto). The best bit is all the Lego though, and this Christmas just gone (and his recent birthday) was very Legocentric. I have built a great many highly complicated Lego sets, many of which I have also been drawing pictures of afterwards in the sketchbook devoted to my son’s things; you’ll have seen some already.
The top one is the Golden Dragon, piloted by none other than the Gold Ninja. That was a satisfying one to build, and I built it really quickly on Christmas Day. The gold doesn’t stop there. Next up is the Gold Ninja Mech, which came with the Temple of Light set. I sketched this one because who doesn’t love drawing big robots, and I showed it to my son who, while he did like the robot, basically highlighted my ignorance of the Ninjago genre by having Sensei Wu (the bearded fellow with the stick, a kind of Lego Mr. Miyagi) piloting the thing. Oh no, it should have been the Gold Ninja, he said, Sensei Wu doesn’t have a Mech. But, but the Gold Ninja’s already flying the Golden Dragon, I protested. I’m not drawing it again.
So for the last one I drew the Red Ninja Kai-Fighter, and I left it pilotless. I do know the Red Ninja (known as Kai) flies this and I have even seen the cartoon, but knowing me I will probably get the version of his uniform wrong or something. Listen, if you think young kids don’t pick up on tiny tiny details you’re wrong. I still remember years ago when my son pointed out a slight difference between the Lightning McQueen on his diaper to the one on his night-light, a detail so small only a highly trained supreme intellect would notice. I was the same. At age four I was counting vertebrae on dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History Museum and pointing out errors to the scientist tour-guides, nowadays I can barely remember the dinosaur’s names. Diplocerataurus Rex, right? Tell you what though, I’m good at this Lego lark now though. More has been built since, and there’s more to draw.
big red samurai
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.
knights vs pirates
A break from the Portland sketches, but this is connected, for those toy pirates were bought in a toystore in downtown Portland. These are some of my son’s Playmobil toys, pirates and knights. This year he got into knights in quite a big way, after we visited the Tower of London and picked up a couple of plastic swords and a toy knight’s helmet. Since then I’ve been battered in an onslaught of medieval mayhem (he has a plastic bow and arrow set also, which I’ve been on the rubber-suction-cup end of once or twice), although we’ve made our own shields (his design, of course). However it is always safer (for me) if the battles are between little plastic men, so I’ve upped his Playmobil collection with more knights, and of course (since I was dressed as one myself in Portland), pirates. Well this set of pirates has a cannon, so the latest game is called “knocking down the bad guys”, though it evolves into a general theme of knights vs pirates. Let me tell you, this plastic cannon is pretty powerful, but those knights with their shields are equally tough and can sometimes take a bit of a pounding before falling down. I love Playmobil toys, they’re the best, and they’re also great to draw. These ones are in his Stillman and Birn ‘alpha’ book, the one where I’m drawing his stuff.
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.
easy, tiger
This is Tiger, my son’s favourite. He’s been around for many years. Not as soft as he used to be, his fur has faded over the years, but he’s loveable all the same. Sketched in the Stillman & Birn “Alpha” book in which I’m documenting his things.
man of iron
Another one from the book of my son’s ‘things’, this is his Iron Man toy, or more specifically Mark 42. This is a favourite. Of course, I have been attempting to make Iron Man costumes (to fit a five-year old, not for me, not yet) out of cardboard, with varying levels of success. A project I will be working more on. I have cardboard, duck tape, little LED lights, fasteners, paint and velcro. So far, Mark 42, Iron Patriot, and I have plans for the Mark 7 (when I make my own, it will be Silver Centurion, oh yeah). This one however can talk. It is very cool.
Drawn in the Stillman & Birn Alpha book with copic multiliner, pigma sensei pen and W&N artist’s watercolour.
petescully 