Last night my wife Kara, friends Ben and Kelly Young and I went and checked out LEGO® Star Wars: The Exhibition at Melbourne Museum.

The exhibition was conceived and expertly crafted by renowned LEGO Certified Professional, Ryan ‘Brickman’ McNaught and his team from over eight million bricks and is presented as an immersive adventure taking you on a journey through a galaxy far, far away. I was lucky enough to be invited along by Ryan to attend the Wednesday 22nd May family and friends session.

Here is a description of what you can expect at the exhibition, from the Melbourne Museum website:

LEGO® fans and Star Wars enthusiasts will experience the Force like never before, with iconic characters and scenes brought to life in stunning LEGO® brick detail. Step into a world of epic battles, gargantuan spaceships and stunning landscapes from a galaxy far, far away. Using over 8 million LEGO® bricks and taking more than 25,000 hours to complete, LEGO® Star Wars: The Exhibition is built right here in Melbourne at The Brickman headquarters.

Visitors are also invited to help build massive LEGO Star Wars landscapes brick by brick, take part in hands-on build activities, and see their LEGO Star Wars builds digitally come to life as they choose their allegiance and face-off against their friends. From building starfighters to creating custom lightsabers out of LEGO bricks, there will be interactive elements and engaging experiences for fans of all ages!

I was thoroughly impressed with LEGO Star Wars: The Exhibition, obviously – and it probably goes without saying – with the expertly designed and crafted large scale builds realising all the beloved characters, ships and locations from the Star Wars Universe that you would expect to see from The Brickman team but specifically with the level of interactivity and thought put into how the audience moves through the exhibition and interacts with each zone.

Key stand-outs for me were all the build zones where attendees can get hands-on with bricks and build ships, droids, lightsaber hilts and mosaic tiles contributing to the exhibition itself but also their own experience of the exhibition. The use of technology in the spaceship battle, lightsaber fight and even the mosaic system were particularly great.

My favourite exhibits would have to be the lifesize emperor’s throne with praetorian guards and Milennium Falcon cockpit photo opportunities, through I also loved the cutaway Imperial Star Destroyer and Death Star as well as the Endor display.

Well done to Ryan and the whole Brickman team on LEGO Star Wars: The Exhibition, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience taking the time to explore the whole exhibition, it was easily the most immersive LEGO exhibition I have ever seen.

If you are heading to Melbourne in the near future, make sure you head over to the Melbourne Museum and check it out. Tickets can be purchased via the Melbourne Museum website or at the door.

I know I have talked about this in my tshirt design post, but being a graphic designer means that I end up applying my professional skillset to my LEGO hobby as well. This time I am going to show some LEGO mosaics that I have designed for Bendigo LEGO User Group events.

One of the activities that my local LUG runs throughout the year for various community events are large scale community LEGO mosaic builds. Basically this means that we have a stock of LEGO bricks in 30 colours, hundreds of 16×16 plates (one for each community member who takes part) and a purpose built trailer with hydraulic lifting side covered in baseplates to create a giant canvas for these community artworks to be assembled, displayed and transported.

We have perfected the system we use for running these community builds over many years, and one of my roles is that I sometimes get to design concepts for the artwork of the mosaics. Below are a few examples of mosaics that I have designed over the last couple of years.

This is the first mosaic that I designed for Bendigo LEGO User Group and some of the lessons learned on this mosaic have informed future designs. The mosaic features a farmer minifig and a horserider minifig standing on the arena at the Prince of Wales Showgrounds in Bendigo with a blue healer, a cow, a sheep and a rooster. In the background you can see a silhouette of a ferris wheel and tents/marquees with fireworks overhead. The Bendigo Agricultural Show logo is featured in a giant first prize ribbon.

1. Bendigo Agricultural Show 2024 Mosaic Concept
2. Bendigo Agricultural Show 2024 Mosaic Complete

This one was pretty quick to design as Bloom – Bendigo’s spring festival – is all about tulips. My first concept was to create some tulips made from LEGO bricks, this was presented to the client as an idea and they approved it straight away.

There were a few challenges with this mosaic when it came to the assembly as we did not load the trailer with enough of our medium azure bricks so some of the later sections were completed in medium blue bricks and as you can no doubt see in the completed image, some of the sections of the stem of the last tulip have not been placed correctly.

1. Tulips Mosaic Concept
2. Tulips Mosaic Complete

For the Bendigo Easter Festival 2024 we ran two mosaic activities over the Friday and Saturday of the Easter long weekend so I got to design two mosaics, one for each day. The idea of having an Easter Bunny for the first mosaic was suggested by Bendigo LEGO User Group committee member Ben Luddington and the idea of having a Chinese dragon for the second mosaic was suggested by Bendigo LEGO User Group committee member Michael Peebles. We made a conscious decision to choose a different colour palette for each day’s mosaic so that we did not run our stocks of any particular colour too low. These two mosaics are personally the favourites that I have designed to date.

1. Day 1 Happy Easter Mosaic Concept
2. Day 1 Happy Easter Mosaic Complete
3. Day 2 Happy Year of the Dragon Mosaic Concept
4. Day 2 Happy Year of the Dragon Mosaic Complete

Over the weekend my wife Kara and I went and checked out the Relics: A New World Rises Exhibition at Melbourne Museum.

I want to start by talking a little about what Relics is, the press release sets the scene:
Set in a future long after humanity’s reign, RELICS tells the story of a world where LEGO® minifigures have risen from the debris to craft intricate civilisations in discarded human artefacts, each one inspired by the object they now call home.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Jackson Harvey and Alex Towler, the 2020 winners of LEGO® Masters Australia.  Relics comprises of 12 expertly crafted displays created from a combination of large scale found objects and incorporating intricately detailed LEGO environments which tie in with and build upon the found object.

I was thoroughly impressed with Relics, I have seen many many LEGO shows and events over the past decade and I must say that this exhibition stands out from what I have seen before. Relics: A New World Rises feels like a cohesive world, it is evident that Jackson and Alex have expertly crafted each exhibit, from the skill and precision they have employed in the brick built elements, the sourcing of the found objects and finally to the careful staging of each exhibit. The graphic designer in me loved the attention to detail in even the printed ephemera and signage included throughout the Relics world.

My favourite exhibits would have to be the cryogenics lab refrigerator and the time machine grandfather clock.

Well done to Jackson and Alex on the amazing achievement that is Relics: A New World Rises, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience of the exhibition, it was easily one of the most enjoyable and creative LEGO exhibitions I have seen.

If you are heading to Melbourne before January 28th 2024, make sure you head over the Melbourne Museum and check out Relics. Tickets can be purchased via the Melbourne Museum website or at the door.

Edit: Through the generosity of Melbourne Museum I have two Relics tickets to give away, if you would like to go in the draw to win one, click here and fill out the form!

Thank you to Melbourne Museum for reaching out to me with some complimentary tickets for this exhibition.

In my 9-5 Monday-Friday life I am a graphic designer and art director so I guess it was only natural that the toolset of a designer would find its way into my LEGO hobby as well.

Not only does my experience and appreciation for design inform what and how I like to build, but I also find ways to use my design skills to help out LUGs and events. This has involved designing various items for groups and events over the years, in this post I am going to talk about tshirt designs.

Designing Tshirts for LUGs and events started with my own local LUG, Bendigo LEGO User Group.  It began when I was asked to design a new logo for the group when they became an Official Recognised LEGO User Group and changed their name from Bendigo Area LEGO Designers to Bendigo LEGO User Group. There was no members tshirt to begin with, however once I had designed the new logo I thought it would would be good to have it on a shirt to wear at events and I took it upon myself to design and print my own LUG shirt.  After a few members saw me wear the tshirt at events and our meetings it sparked an idea in the committee to offer tshirts to LUG members.

1. Bendigo LEGO User Group Members Tshirt 2018-2022
2. Bendigo LEGO User Group Members Tshirt 2023-current

I was first approached to design a tshirt for exhibitors attending Bendigo Bricks 2021 by LUG ambassador Michael Peebles, the design is based on a tshirt he had seen at an International event.

After that first year a precedent was established of having a custom designed shirt for exhibitors to wear at Bendigo Bricks and the next year I designed a tshirt based on the LEGO Expert symbol.

The third shirt that I designed for Bendigo Bricks featured that most sought after of LEGO animals, the goat.

The fourth shirt that I have designed for Bendigo Bricks so far is based on an idea from Bendigo LEGO User Group committee member Darren Hutchesson and features a red LEGO 2×4 brick half as a 3d rendering and half as a schematic diagram.

1. Bendigo Bricks Exhibitors TShirt 2020
2. Bendigo Bricks Exhibitors TShirt 2022
3. Bendigo Bricks Exhibitors TShirt 2023
4. Bendigo Bricks Exhibitors TShirt 2024

I have also designed some tshirts for Brickvention, the exhibitor version features the Brickvention logo (which I designed in 2020). The tshirt colours change from year to year and are chosen by the Brickventures committee.

In 2023 I was approached by the Brickvention committee to design some new merchandise tshirts as well as reusing one of the previous designs from Bendigo Bricks.

1 & 2. Brickvention Exhibitor TShirts Examples
3. Black Falcons Shield TShirt
4. Expert Symbol TShirt
5. Koala TShirt

So these are the few examples of event and LUG tshirts that I have designed so far, I will update this post with other tshirt designs as they are completed.

If you have a LEGO event or LUG and need a custom tshirt designed, please feel free to get in touch.

Edit: Updated April 7 2024 with BV24 and BB24 tshirts.