By Khrista Davis
Warren Elsmore, a Lego artist who is based in Edinburgh, brought his Lego city art creation to the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.
Brick City is a Lego-built representation of iconic buildings from cities all across the world with some recognisable and unknown highlights of cities over five continents such as Las Vegas through to Rio.
The exhibition has been in Leicester since 17th of August. Yet one building seems to attract more eyes in the exhibition that any other.
Warren said: “By a long way, the St Pancras model. Mainly because of the size – it uses 180,000 pieces which all must be placed by hand. It was also the only model in Brick City that I built as an amateur – before starting my company. That meant about two years of evenings and weekends.”
Starting from the age of three, Warren had a love for Lego and always asked for it at any chance he got. He moved away from Lego as a teenager but when he was 20, he found Lego again and it has been a part of his life ever since.
Whilst fun and fascinating for parents to take their kids to, some may wonder how something as youthful as Lego has now become a form of art.
He said: “LEGO art is accepted more easily now than it used to be. LEGO have even released several LEGO Art sets this year.
“When I came back to LEGO, in the early 2000s, it was tough to convince people that adults were even allowed to play with LEGO. It certainly wasn’t something I talked about at work!
“However, there has always been a strong ‘Adult Fan of LEGO’ scene and now it is more popular than ever. There are people all over the world now, creating art with LEGO bricks, that go way beyond anything that you would recognise from your childhood.
“LEGO recognises this in the LEGO House, a public attraction in the Danish home of the company itself, Billund.”
But any welcomed criticisms did not stop Warren.
“We have broken two Guinness World Records. One for the largest LEGO picture (600,000 pieces) and one for the largest LEGO ship (1.05 Million pieces). It was a special project for the ferry company, DFDS. There are lots of details on our website – it was a fantastic project to be involved in.
“We’re always working on something, though a lot of the time the models are commissioned by our clients and we can’t say what they are. The best way to keep up to date is to like our page on Facebook or follow me on Twitter. Whenever we can – we’ll post something on there!”
For more information, go to facebook.com/brickwarren.
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