The Art of Lego Building

This is an Art History Paper Alexander wrote for his 8th grade art class. (His teacher asked him to hand write it, so dad is typing it for him so we can document it here on Learning Signs.)

ART HISTORY PAPER

The art of Lego building is not known or recognized by most people. Many people will say legos are just something I use to play with as a kid. In all actuality Lego building by adults and kids is fine tuned in the creativity side of things. Of course people building with Lego is only as recent as Lego itself which is fairly new. Lego building is something that requires a lot of skill and practice to do well and something many people have mastered.

Lego building in some ways is a lot like sculpting. When you sculpt something you are chipping or cutting parts away to reveal an object that the artist has in mind. Building in Lego is not as different as it seems. When building with Lego you start with one piece than add another on top of that. In many ways Lego building is a lot easier and you an create a lot more complicated and bigger art work than you can sculpting with clay or rock. There are different sizes, shapes, lengths, textures, detail, color, and the list just goes one and on with all the uses and ability of all the pieces that you have access to. There are also different types of creations you can make. You can build something in mini-scale just meaning in looks smaller or makes something huge into a more buildable scale. You can build in mini-figure scale which means you can use Legos version of a person and use them in your build. Another thing you can build in is just a larger scale which is too big for a mini figure to use. Then you can also had design creations that use different pieces in unusual ways to make designs or pictures.

There are many wonderful but right now I will only mention one. [sic] Katie WAlker is a AFOL – Adult Fan of Lego – and makes wonderfully detailed mosaics. Using small cheese slopes (little angled pieces) and tiles she is able to make intricate designs. This is really something amazing and incredible. You can find more of her work and examples by searching for eilonwy77 on Flickr.

Creating art is lots of fun and something I love to do. Even though they haven’t been around that long they are still great. Lots of very skilled AFOL’s are still creating amazing creations and art. So next time someone asks you what an awesome new art you can reply Lego building.

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