Brandon Foster

I built my first LEGO castle at age nine, and every wall stood perfectly perpendicular to the next. Straight lines. Square corners. Ninety degrees, every single time. Boring. By age fourteen I had tried to make a slanted roof and watched my hinge plates flop apart like a broken jaw. The fix turned out to … Read more

I built my first skyscraper MOC three years ago and hated how chunky the windows looked. Every pane sat one full stud away from the wall above it, breaking the illusion of glass set into masonry. Then a friend showed me a 1×2 jumper plate and everything changed. A half-stud offset is the LEGO building … Read more

If you’ve ever built a LEGO castle and felt the walls looked too flat, too plastic, or just plain boring, the problem wasn’t your bricks. It was your texture. Great LEGO texture building turns a stack of grey rectangles into a believable medieval ruin, a crumbling fortress, or a mossy stone cottage. I’ve spent years … Read more

I have spent the last few years building with LEGO almost every day, and one question keeps coming back from newer builders: are illegal LEGO building techniques real, and why do AFOLs talk about them as if they were actual laws? The short answer is yes, they are real, but they are LEGO-illegal, not actually … Read more

Building circles and domes out of straight LEGO bricks feels impossible at first. The bricks snap into rigid 90-degree grids, yet somehow people build stunning round towers, smooth domes, and perfect spheres every day. I spent three months testing different approaches in my workshop, and I’m going to share exactly how to build circles and … Read more

If you have ever stared at a LEGO spaceship and wondered why some models look like toys while others look like miniature film props, the answer is almost always greebling. Greebling is a LEGO building technique that adds small details and texture to the surface of builds to make them appear more realistic and complex, … Read more

Building a pristine LEGO castle or modern city is satisfying, but nothing tells a story quite like a battle-scarred wall covered in grime, cracks, and scorch marks. When I first started building war-torn dioramas, my walls looked too clean, too perfect, and frankly too toy-like. That all changed once I learned how to make LEGO … Read more

When I built my first LEGO sign for my son’s bedroom wall, I thought bigger letters meant easier reading. The opposite happened. The bulky bricks created shadows that swallowed the curves of the letters, and from across the room the whole thing looked like a smudged rectangle. I rebuilt it three times before it actually … Read more

When I built my first medieval LEGO castle, every roof looked flat and plastic. The tiles were too smooth, the colors too uniform, and the whole thing screamed “toy” instead of “storybook village.” That changed the day I discovered cheese slopes. In this guide, I’ll show you how to use cheese slopes for roofs, the … Read more

Building a microscale skyscraper on a small baseplate is one of the most rewarding challenges in LEGO. You are working with a tiny footprint — sometimes as small as 8 by 8 studs — and trying to capture the essence of a towering structure that, in real life, might be a hundred stories tall. That … Read more