For decades, the LEGO Group made plastic blocks that fit together to form buildings, cars, and other creations. With time, they started to introduce smaller parts that allowed for more intricate builds on a smaller scale. As such, it opens LEGO builders to build real world objects at scale and exhibit them in The Art of LEGO Scale Modeling by Dennis Glaasker and Dennis Bosman.
The Art of LEGO Scale Modeling is broken down into nine sections. Trucks, ships, aircraft, racing, heavy equipment, trains, military, motocycles, and cars are all represented in the book. Each section has between three and eleven models representing the topic with each model receiving a double page spread of photos and a paragraph or two about the real vehicle and details on how it was built, and a few of the receiving a second double page spread to show off some of the details.
The tenth chapter is titled How It’s Done. It give a bit of a cursory overview of how scale models are done, encouraging the reader to build the commercial LEGO models and then giving a little advice about getting parts, building, and photographing/displaying the models once they are built.
It is inspiring to see the level of detail that go into the models, but it would be nice to learn more about how they are built and how to build scale models from LEGO parts. To look at these models definitely give ideas, but doesn’t give the readers a feel for how to get started themselves, but more of a static collection of things that can be built. Not that there is anything wrong with using the book to display, but the final chapter implies that it may teach the reader something, but falls short.
The Art of LEGO Scale Modeling is a nice collection of things that are built to scale of real world objects. The models and the photography capturing them are beautiful, but it would have been nice to give a launching point to really help get new builders to get started instead of teasing them at the end.
