I was contacted by an art consultant who had seen the Deer Family sculptures I built for The LEGO Company’s new office buildings. She was interested in something similar for a client of hers, the owner of the professional NBA basketball team The Milwaukee Bucks.
We initially discussed creating a sculpture in the team’s colors (tan and green), but they fell in love with my rainbow-colored portraiture, so we decided to create something very bold and colorful instead.
Created over the course of 6 months, the sculpture measures over 175cm (6 feet) tall. (See below for some behind-the-scenes). I love the way it came out — lately I have creating bright, colorful, luscious, joyful works and just love the aesthetic. It feels like a sculptural representation of the 2D portraiture I’ve been creating this past year.
Building it
My original Buck sculpture was originally created in 2014, nearly 10 years ago and I was no longer satisfied with the design. My client liked old the sculpture, but to my eyes in 2023, the ears were too big, the antlers too small, the head too narrow, and the shape of the back of the neck bothered me. I also felt like it needed a bit more height to feel as majestic as I imagined it to be. So I decided to completely start from scratch with an entirely new sculptural design. I feel that this pose is much more natural and the proportions are better.
Creating vertical stripes with LEGO bricks is very challenging! Vertical stacks of pieces do not connect side-to-side, so I had to connect them behind the surface by alternating interlocking rows and using lots of corner-shaped pieces and other tricks. As a result, the sculpture took nearly twice as long to create than if it had just been made of a single-color! But I love the end result, and it was well worth the extra effort.
The entire sculpture is mounted to a steel plate and reinforced with a custom steel armature. Every LEGO piece is glued in place one-by-one to ensure the sculpture will stand the test of time. The antlers are removable and reinforced with metal, both to aid in transport and to prevent damage. Every LEGO brick used in the sculpture is a commercially-available off-the-shelf LEGO piece that you can find in a toy store — I don’t have anything that the kids don’t have! :)
The sculpture measures 175cm (6 feet) tall, contains 34,289 LEGO pieces, and took 2-3 months to design and construct at my studio in Amsterdam. It’s now on it’s way to The United States for permanent installation at the home of the owner of The Milwaukee Bucks professional NBA team.
If you like this work, you can commission a custom LEGO sculpture as well.
