How to become a Lego artist: Ryan McNaught's Wonders of the World exhibit

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How to become a Lego artist

Ever wanted to create an ambitious Lego megastructure or artwork, but didn't know where to start? Certified Lego professional Ryan McNaught has some tips to help you out.

Lego sculptors, artists and exhibitors often catch the eye of our inner child, with artworks made of the world's favourite building block making regular headlines around the world.

But how does your average aspiring Lego artist get started with an ambitious project featuring hundreds (or thousands) of very particular, and very expensive, plastic bricks?

Australia's only certified Lego professional Ryan McNaught, premiering his new show Wonders of the World in Brisbane, says it takes a good scavenger to locate the right bricks needed to complete your masterpiece.

"You can use eBay and those kind of places. Gumtree, go to the Salvo stores, St Vinnies, all those places," he says.

"Lego — because it's not thrown out, it's not a disposable thing — people hang onto it and pass it down, but there's lots of places you can get good Lego.

"But one thing that Lego's [official store] has now that they didn't when I first started, which is amazing, is 'pick-a-brick', which is like mixed lollies. 'I'll have 27 of those, 140 of those, three of those'. And you can just choose the pieces that you want.

"Now if I had have had that when I started it would have been a whole different kettle of fish. I was buying Lego sets which might have only had one or two of a particular piece in it, and I needed 400 of them. So they've got this amazing ability to pick what they want and how many they want, which is really cool."

And if you harbour ambitions of creating an eye-catching Lego megastructure, you better hit the books from a young age.

"[Kids are] going to hate me, but their parents are going to like me — they need to be awesome at maths. So seriously, do really good maths at school, go to as high a level as you can," McNaught says.

"Everything we do is mathematical, it's all about pattern recognition, it's about algebra, it's about geometry, it's about all sorts of stuff.

"I use maths I thought I'd never use in highschool, I thought 'that's just ridiculous, as if you're ever going to use that kind of stuff', but we use it all today. I had my highschool reunion not long ago, and my maths teacher just laughed. That's always a good sign, I guess."

It is with this in mind that his Wonders of the World exhibit — making its world premiere in Brisbane today before it moves on to Sydney, Perth and Melbourne — encourages its audience to join in and contribute their own brick creations to the displays.

"The thing we learned from our previous exhibition that we've really amplified this time is the interactive element," McNaught says.

"Around the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it's surrounded by a moat of Lego and people get to build their version of it and place it on display next to it.

"The Arc de Triumph, people get to make the traffic jam that goes around it. The Statue of David, they make statues of themselves. There's lots of these different exhibits where people get to make their work and put it on display as well."

After McNaught's exhibit concludes in Melbourne in 2017, it will head overseas to an even bigger audience.

As one of only 14 certified Lego professionals in the world, McNaught operates a whole different level to the budding brick artist.

"Obviously since I've been a professional Lego builder — since 2010 I've been doing it full time — we're in different scales. I have a team of six people that work underneath me as sculptors and model makers. We work in much larger economies of scale," he says.

"For example, when we get Lego, we buy a container, we don't buy a packet from K-Mart. It's on a different scale.

"To a degree, we're not as commercialised, so we're not particularly interested in making Star Wars things or making commercial-type products. We're more using it as a medium for our creativity.

"Kids will buy a Star Wars set because it's got the Millennium Falcon, or Han Solo in it, but we're not really interested in that. We're more interested in what we can make out of this."

McNaught says the enthralling scale of the exhibit will help educate young minds about history and the world around them.

"I've always had this big list of things I want to make and I still do — it's an enormous long list — and I thought 'How I group those? How do I add some continuity to them?'

"Also, perhaps more importantly, I had to figure out ways we could educate kids by stealth, meaning kids will learn stuff without knowing that they're learning.

"So the ancient wonders of the world, [kids learn about history] and they wouldn't naturally think of that, but the fact we've made them out of Lego makes it really cool and they can see really interesting things.

"'Hanging Gardens of Babylon? What was that about? Why are there conveyor belts of water?' Things like that. We have the ancient wonders, some modern wonders, industrial wonders as well as things that I think are wonders together to form a continuous show.

"Certain models will have different things. The Statue of David for example is one colour. There's no super minutiae — there is, but you've got to look hard for it — whereas if you look at Himeji Castle from Japan where we've cut it in half, you can see the temple, the shrines, the emperor's bedroom, all of these really fine details, so we've got that real combination of both."

Ryan McNaught's Wonders of the World Lego exhibition is running from November 23 to December 14 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Credits

Words and photos: James Maasdorp

Topics: brisbane-4000, qld, australia

First posted