About me

 

I'm a professor of electrical engineering who enjoys making lego fan art as a hobby. I had many lego sets as a kid, but they eventually got packed away. In October 2013, I decided to pull out all of my old legos* and sort them, then I decided to build a large model of Ostagar from Dragon Age Origins. My little brother, also a lego fan, shared my album online, and I realized that I enjoyed making fan art to share with other fans. After a couple more practice builds, I built a model of the climactic scene from Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, just in time for a friend to show to Sanderson at a signing. He shared it online, and people seemed to enjoy it, so I’ve continued to make and post fan art ever since.

*The official rule is that "lego" is an adjective, so using it as a noun is bad, and adding an "s" at the end to pluralize it is even worse. I tend not to follow the rules, though. I'm kind of a rebel.

Part of why I like this hobby is that there is always another new skill I can learn. Beyond the builds themselves, I've had to learn photography, decal design and application, image editing, fabric element design, 3D rendering, and website content management systems. Acquiring legos affordably also seems to be a skill in itself, as is maintaining accuracy with the source material.  I don’t have any formal training in art, photography, crafting, or web design.  If you look at my older albums (maybe my recent albums too), that fact is quite evident.

Print sales and other support

Prints of selected works are for sale at https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/fastlindyrick/ . Right now I only sell works related to Brandon Sanderson's books, since that is all I have approval for. Print sales are in compliance with Brandon's policy on fan art, and I’ve gotten approval from Brandon's art director, Isaac; but otherwise I have no affiliation with Brandon or his company, Dragonsteel. Buying these helps me afford new supplies, and purchases are greatly appreciated!

Donations: If you don't need a print but would like to donate a few dollars, you can do so at my ko-fi page.

My workspace

My wife and I each have hobbies, and we try to balance our resources fairly. She uses one room for her nail (polish) art and I use another room for lego art, and we spend comparable amounts on the two hobbies. I use a variety of Akro-Mils and Sterilite multi-drawer organizers to keep my collection organized, and maintaining this organization accounts for about 20% of my time in this hobby. My workspace has three 6' x 3' tables; a computer for organizing my notes, designing custom prints and decals, and doing post-production photo editing; a stereo for listening to audio books (my older collection is on CD); and a cat tree which utterly fails to keep our three cats from stealing my chair.

Contact

If you'd like to reach me, feel free to message me at . I'm also on Facebook and Twitter multiple times per day, but in the past I've had problems with not getting all of my Facebook notifications. I've had people send messages that were auto-filtered with no notification sent to me; and when I get a lot of notifications all at once, sometimes Facebook is selective about what it notifies me about for some reason. Anyway, I do my best to respond to Facebook comments and messages, but I don’t always see them, for which I apologize. If you'd like to send me a Friend Request, please accompany it with a brief introduction message if I don't already know you, just so I have some idea who I'm friending (and this also helps make sure I saw your request). All my lego stuff is public, so a Friend Request won’t show you more legos, just my political views (I'm a liberal) and my complaining about my students.

I'm also on other social media platforms (Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, 17th Shard) with the username "fastlindyrick." The username comes from swing dancing, which is another one of my hobbies.