Brendan Powell Smith

Thanks for the kind words. As to your question, unfortunately there is almost nothing from The Brick Testament that I've kept intact. Almost everything gets dismantled within a week or two of being photographed (except the sets and characters that I know I'll need to keep around for the next set of stories). There are two reasons for this. One is so I always have the raw materials for the next set of stories. The other is that it would just take up too much room to keep everything intact. When I do keep stuff around, like The Garden of Eden or the Last Supper, I will eventually find myself pulling pieces off from them that I happen to need at the moment, so after a while they don't look so impressive anymore. Maybe someday if I get a bigger house (or when the Brick Testament museum opens in Denmark in 2017), I'll be able to have a lot more stuff on permanent display. But I tend to think of the photographs themselves as the final product rather than the LEGO structures. And the nice thing about photos is they don't take up a lot of physical space these days. Best, -Brendan

The Brick Testament launches a new section of the website today with nine new illustrated Bible stories chronicling the start of the reign of King Solomon: Solomon Becomes King, David’s Last Words, Solomon Kills His Brother, Solomon Kills Joab, Solomon Kills Shimei, Pharaoh’s Son-in-Law, Solomon Gets Wise, Two Prostitutes, One Baby, and The Wisdom of Solomon. Here’s a preview image: -Brendan Powell Smith The Brick Testament - The World's Largest, Most Comprehensive Illustrated Bible

Wow, I must say that is one of the most elegant-looking MOCs I've seen in a long time. Brilliant combo of parts. Love the minifig legs and 1x1 slopes on top. This certainly makes my minifig-scale guillotine from a few years ago look pathetic by comparison. Bravo. -Brendan Powell Smith

The Brick Testament is celebrating its 350th illustrated Bible story with the addition of an illustrated psalm that brings a fitting final close to the King David section of the site. Click either preview image below to view the new story. -Brendan Powell Smith The Brick Testament - The World's Largest, Most Comprehensive Illustrated Bible

Well, my LEGO collection is pretty big by this point, but I think a lot of people assume that it's much larger than it really is. The key thing to know is that I am constantly deconstructing things I built just days or weeks before so that I have enough raw materials to recycle into new illustrated stories. There is really almost nothing from The Brick Testament that sits around intact. The few times I've tried to keep something intact and on display, I quickly find that I can't resist pulling off parts that I need for a new story until eventually what's left on display no longer looks so good. I don't have any particularly unusual way of acquiring bricks, and definitely no special relationship with the LEGO company. About 4-5% of the bricks are still around from my childhood collection. When I first started adding to my collection as an adult, it was back when eBay was just starting up, and there were some pretty good deals to be had, and that helped me get a lot of the sets and parts from the late 80s and the 90s that I'd missed out on. In the early 2000s I did buy a fair amount of retail sets, on sale whenever possible. But at some point a few years ago I decided I pretty much had enough basic brick parts to work with, so I've now switched to mostly buying very specific parts on Bricklink.com, or buying from the Pick-a-Brick wall at the local LEGO store (or the online version at LEGO.com). Supplementing all that, there's also been a goodly amount of LEGO gifts from family and friends who are fans of The Brick Testament. As I mentioned, there's no special relationship betwene TLC and me or The Brick Testament. I don't think they've ever expressed any official company position on The Brick Testament. The closest I remember was when at a LEGO convention, former Senior Vice President of LEGO Direct Brad Justus was giving the keynote address and told the audience of AFOLs "we trust you with the brick" and then after a pause "even you, Brendan". While it was nice (and funny) to be singled out for attention like that, I think the point was more that I'm equally trusted as everyone else, not that any special seal of approval was being given to me in particular. I have talked to individual LEGO company employees and a few former employees who have let me know they are fans of The Brick Testament, and that's an honor, but again, I don't take such things as speaking for the company as whole at all. Thanks for the kind welcome! -Brendan

It is very nice to have a LEGO project that has garnered appeal beyond just fans of LEGO, but "famous" may be overstating the case. I'm still at the point where I continually need to remind strangers that I am a minor internet celebrity. :-) I guess LEGO builders fall on different points of the spectrum from "Complete and Utter LEGO Purist" to "I'll use Scotch Tape and Megabloks in my MOCs if it suits me". I am certainly not immaculate in my purity, but I've maintained certain standards for myself that I'm comfortable with. In the first Brick Testament story I ever illustrated back in 2001, I realized that for God to have white hair, I would have to resort to modifying a white space helmet with a hobby knife. Since then I have generally modified LEGO pieces only as a last resort, and always only by removing material from LEGO elements, never by adding non-LEGO elements. But I certainly understand how other builders wish to hold themselves to higher purity standards. For the specific cases above, I was illustrating a story in which David's army kills the king of the Ammonites who is said to have a crown with a precious stone set in it. The crown is then set on David's head. The Bible doesn't actually say whether or not David continued to wear it as his "main crown", so that's artistic license on my part. Anyhow, I thought and thought about how I could create such a crown without modifying any parts, but in the end, I went with what you see. I felt the need to modify the dragon helmets simply because the chin-protectors covered up the minifigs' faces too much, and characters became difficult to recognize in photos. Joab's sharpened longsword is the most gratuitous modification here in that I did it simply because I wanted a "hero sword" that stood out from the others. The place where I do the most modifications is to minifig faces. Early on in working on The Brick Testament, I decided that for illustrating so many Bible stories, I needed a greater variety of faces than LEGO had made officially available at the time. And in some cases it was very frustrating to have a minifig face that could pass for an ancient Bible character except for one little detail, like a microphone headset painted to their face. So I have taken a fairly free hand in removing bits of official LEGO minifig faces in order to get a wider variety of faces to choose from when "casting" characters. I do have some non-Biblical MOCs, mostly from before I started work on The Brick Testament, so they're pretty old by now. The one type of non-Biblical MOC I'm most proud of is the "headlight brick" mosaics I've done based on this technique I stumbled upon while making God in cloud form for The Brick Testament's depiction of Exodus. Thanks for the comments! -Brendan

The raised flattop hair is my best approximation of the Philistine headdress that the actual Philistines seem to have worn (or at least some of them) as depicted in wall carvings that the Egyptians made. For instance: I even have David don the Philistine headdress when he joins sides with the Philistines against the Israelites: Thanks! -Brendan

KhoRne, that City Bum impulse set is completely brilliant. Very nice presentation too. I was proud to cast my vote in its favor. -Brendan Powell Smith http://thebricktestament.com

Since the normal minifig legs look so much like modern day pants, I wanted a way to portray minifigs wearing more ancient-looking outfits. My solution (and I readily admit it's not a perfect one) has been to use 1x2 bricks to look like either kilts or, if the brick color matches the torso color, something more like a tunic that stretches from shoulder down to the knees. The yellow 1x1 round bricks are then legs. Sometimes I'll extend the tunic (or a woman's dress) down to the ankle and just use 1x1 round plates as feet. I suppose what's extra confusing is that I don't use this technique for all my figs in The Brick Testament, so sometimes I do have my ancient minifigs wearing standard minifig "pants". That's generally because I didn't start using this technique until a year or so into the project, and because it's a lot easier to show minifigs in a running pose with standard legs, and because sometimes I still just like the way normal "pants" legs look better than my tunic-style legs. Hope my lack of standardization is not too distracting. Thanks for the compliment on Absalom's hair. I'm not sure what I would have used if those Dwarf beards hadn't become available! -Brendan

Hi, Paul. Thanks for the kind words. That technique of forced perspective is something that I stumbled upon early in the Brick Testament project, but now it's hard to imagine how I would have been able to get by without it. I feel that it sometimes doesn't work quite as well as I'd like it to, but on the whole I think it's something I'm getting better at. Although that Egypt shot was good for its time, it makes me cringe a little now to see the "Nile" flowing off into a diagonal horizon, not to mention a pyramid that was done in light gray bricks. Compare that with an example from my most recent set of stories... ...and the effect is much more subtle. To give the illusion of a city stronghold, I built only two small sections of wall. The closer one uses 1x6 arches, and the farther one uses 1x4 arches to look like more of the same style wall at a distance. And just a hint on the 1/4-scale buildings poke out above the wall to imply a fully inhabited city. In general, I almost always try to make sure something microscale is in the background of any exterior shots (usually hills, mountains, trees, etc) to aviod the look of the barren land hitting the horizon that characterizes some of my earliest illustrated stories. I am mostly posting to Eurobricks to discuss the LEGO-related aspects of The Brick Testament. It's not that I'm at all against the idea of discussing or even debating the non-LEGO aspects of The Brick Testament, I'm just wary that other Eurobricks readers may find it annoyingly off-topic. Over at LUGNET.com (the only other LEGO-themed online community I've been a part of) there was a clear way to continue a discussion over in the designated "off-topic" forum, but I'm not sure what the etiquette and protocol are here. Anyhow, I'll be happy to answer any such questions, but if other folks are annoyed and wish us to take such discussion elswhere, I'm open to such suggestions. :-) The part of The Brick Testament that you've singled out here is one I titled "Instructions for Women". From that alone, it should not be too surprising that I did not include the parts of Ephesians that give instructions to husbands, if only because husbands are not women. But I am guessing that the larger nature of your criticism is that I have selectively chosen passages from the Epistles that appear sexist when pulled out of context but are not sexist when read in their original context. So let's put the verse back in context and see how it fares. I notice that in your quote of Ephesians above, you skipped over the verses in between my quote (verse 24) and your quote (28-29). Ephesians 5:25-27, which directly sets up your quote reads as follows: I would contend that this is some highly sexist language in that it implies that, without some sort of death sacrifice from their husbands, wives are somehow unholy, unclean, and blemished. I would also take issue with your actual quote itself, in which husbands are instructed to "love their wives as their own bodies" and where the author contends that "no one has ever hated his own body". This strikes me as being bizarrely opposed to most Christian writings which presume a pure dualism where mind/spirit is entirely separate from body/flesh, and where the spirit is often protrayed as being trapped within a worthless, sinful, fleshly body. Most of Christian teaching, including that of Jesus himself seems to denigrate the body. Whoever wrote this passage of Ephesians seems to be entirely unfamiliar with the longstanding tradition of Christian asceticism which would seem to date back to Jesus and his first disciples. But my shorthand method to see whether something is sexist is just to switch the sexes and see how it reads. Let's try that for Ephesians 5:24-30: Finally, as for my illustration of the wife waiting on the husband found in The Brick Testament, given the larger context of the quote it seems even more appropriate. If a husband wants a beer, for example, he might command his own body to bring him one. If he is to love his wife in the same way he loves his own body, it makes sense that he view her primarily as an object to which he can issue commands in order to satisfy his own desires and achieve his own goals. Sure, you "love your own body" in the sense that you treat it relatively well in order to keep it in healthy working order, but the primary reason you "love your body" is so that it can continue to subserviently obey the commands of your mind, right? Thanks for the comments! I will keep at it. -Brendan

My thanks to everyone who has greeted me so warmly. Nice to know several of you are already enjoying the Brick Testament project, and it's always great to be of inspiration to other builders, just as I have drawn inspiration from so many other great builders. For those new to The Brick Testament, I look forward to hearing your thoughts and criticisms. -Brendan

Hello, all. I've been reading the Eurobricks forums for a while now, and thought maybe I'd officially join and start participating. Some of you may already be familiar with my main LEGO project, The Brick Testament, but for those who are not, it is an attempt to illustrate the entire Bible in LEGO. I've been working the project for over 6 years now, and somewhere along the line, it also became the world's largest and most comprehensive illustrated Bible in general, with 349 stories illustrated so far, covering 19 books of the Bible, with 3,804 individual illustrations. I am currently working on the epic and very dramatic saga of King David. This post concerns my latest update of six new stories which just about bring the King David section to a close. The new stories are: 20,000 Israelites Killed, David Demotes Joab, David Imprisons His Concubines, Revolt, Murder, Decapitation, Young Woman for an Old Man, and Bathsheba’s Scheme. Here's a couple of preview images: At the start of these stories, King David of Israel has been overthrown and by his eldest son Absalom, and made to flee his capital city of Jerusalem. If you feel a little lost joining this story in progress, you might do better to start from earlier in the King David section, or any other part of the website that strikes your fancy. Best regards, Brendan Powell Smith