Brick Sketches: Interview with Chris McVeigh
Posted by Huw,
This year's virtual Fan Media days are over so we now have some great content to share with you over the coming weeks.
First, here's our interview with Chris McVeigh, designer of the Brick Sketches that we revealed last week, in which he tells us which one was the most difficult to perfect, which new parts have revolutionised their design and why the pens are not included in the sets.
What did you think when Brickset revealed the sets last week?
It was actually a complete surprise to me, because my understanding was that they were not going to be announced until later, after the fan media days. So I was just sitting here on the Thursday, when Tim from New Elementary messaged me to say that Brickset had posted pictures of them and I'm like, wait, what?!
But, it was amazing. It's my first product launch so it’s such an exciting time! Seeing the reaction, which is very positive, and people being very encouraging is great!
(It later transpired that LEGO stated the wrong embargo date in the email inviting fan media to receive them for review.)
How did they come to be? Did you pitch them to LEGO?
They came about as a result of something we have internally called Creative Boost. It’s an opportunity where we as designers can propose our own product ideas, themes and whatnot, to see if they get any traction.
A couple of months after I started working at LEGO the other designers were excitedly talking about it and asking what I was going to do for it. I was actually really busy that week and as I was new to the company I thought I can't take time for this. But then I thought, you know what, I'm going see what I can do. So towards the end of the week, I set aside some time and I rebuilt some of my Brick Sketches because, having recently arrived from Canada, I didn’t bring any of my LEGO over with me so didn’t have any already made.
Creative Boost is a bit like a science fair. You set your product idea out, put a placard up, and then the leadership team takes a look round and decides which ones to progress. I was very fortunate that these were selected to be developed and taken forward to become a product. It was just an incredible surprise to me that this happened!
So, to answer your question, yes, it was me who proposed them to the company.
How did you decide on the subjects to model?
It was a team decision We looked at what made sense from a product matrix standpoint, what makes sense from an IP standpoint and so on. We decided to take these four forward.
How did it differ designing them to be LEGO sets compared to designing them before you joined the company?
When I was outside the company, I had started developing my own custom products so that got me in the mindset of how to design things for consumers, so it wasn't vastly different.
Naturally, when you're doing product design in LEGO, you want to give people the best building experience. You want people to enjoy it, to avoid frustration: we really want people to come away from these products feeling happy and fulfilled and enjoy what they've built. So there was more focus on that aspect of the designs.
Some of Chris' earlier work. You can see more on Flickr.
I had defined the ‘DNA’ for the sketches myself before I came into the company, but we made a few refinements to what a Brick Sketch was as we progressed with the designs.
I had already decided on the cut corners and front facing characters, and that they were always 12 bricks wide by 16 bricks tall, but we then fine-tuned things a little. For example, we decided everyone needs to have shoulders, so it feels more like a bust. We decided that the background texture would be tiles instead of studs to give some fun texture variation. We also decided that all humanoids would have faces that are 10 studs wide.
So, that is the reason why Batman was up-sized compared to my original. The fun thing about upsizing Batman is that got to use new and different parts for it and do things that I couldn't do outside the company. So that was fun for me.
The changes I made to the first order Stormtrooper were fun to do too: adding the shoulders, revising the internal construction to use the new parts that we have, and so on. It was fun to revisit and revise them and make them conform to the new standards we had set.
How long does it take to perfect them?
It’s difficult to say.It all depends on the complexity of the character. And of course, it depended upon whether or not I was starting fresh, like I did with The Joker, or if I was upscaling an existing design. I can't give you a specific time frame for those just because I wasn’t sitting at my desk doing nothing but working on them. But I can tell you that outside the company when I was doing the sketches some of them I could do in two days, and some I would revisit and perfect over a month or more. It really depends!
What were the most difficult aspects to perfect?
Faces are always a challenge. The Joker was one that went through the most revisions. There are so many takes on The Joker, so many different versions of him.
Deciding exactly where I was going to take my inspiration from was very difficult. Do I go movie joker? Do I go classic comic joker? Do I do modern comic joker? Do I go Batman animated series classic Mark Hamill style joker?
In the end there was no single version I can point to as my inspiration, but it's certainly influenced by his depiction in 1970s Batman comics, with a bit of grittiness from more modern interpretations. Once I settled on that general direction for him things went quite smoothly, but I had a lot of fun experimentations: bigger hair, bare teeth, other things that were interesting to experiment with but which didn't feel right for the character or the product. So, I had the most fun developing The Joker, and he was definitely the most challenging.
Had you done human faces before?
I had, but getting some of the nuances right is definitely a challenge.
When I did them before I worked for the company, we did not have the 2x2 wedge plates: the smallest wedge plate I had was the 2x3. That made a lot of the development difficult for early brick sketches.
Of course now we have many more wedge plates with different angles, so they open up so many more possibilities: you can give so much more nuance to characters thanks to them. For example, if you look at the Joker's eyes, the way they're done with the 2x2 wedges next to each other was not something that was possible until recently.
I had done Vision from The Avengers outside the company, but the eyes were a sandwich of overlapping wedge plates so were far too deep. I managed to make it work, I think. But that’s an example of how I was under constraints before.
The sets don't include the brick-built pens that you used to show in your photos. Why is that?
The pens were used as a framing device in my original photos, but I never considered them to be part of the sketch itself. We had a very brief discussion about the pens early on but agreed to move forward without them.
How’s it been working during the current pandemic?
We're still mostly working remotely which is interesting for me having worked at home for such a long time. So it wasn't a big adaptation for me. It's been better in some ways but I miss my co-workers. Of course, we have Microsoft Teams, and we go into the office occasionally, but I will be very pleased when we're all back in the office, and we can all work together again.
Do you take a big pile of bricks home with you?
Yes it's a bit like that! A lot of designers have their own stock of bricks, which makes things much easier but I didn't bring anything over with me from Canada, there was too much of it and it was too expensive to ship.
But, yes, we're getting by, we're doing OK!
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Chris, hopefully we can meet again soon.
You’re welcome. I hope so too!
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16 comments on this article
I would get all of the SW ones and a couple of the Marvel ones, if they were on sale. I really like the Starlord, Groot, and Rocket ones!
One thing not discussed was the pricing. I would have liked to know whether both Chris and TLG established the price or whether it was all down to LEGO, especially because of the negative responses on YouTube and sites like Brickset. A lot of people are saying that they are overpriced (myself included), so I would’ve like to have heard Chris’s opinion on that.
Other than that, a spectacular interview!
As someone who’s been following Chris online for years, I’m so glad that he’s become an official designer! We’ll be watching your career with great interest ;-)
Release The Bumble!
That's a great interview, thanks!
I have to agree with him on the pens. When they were MOCs, the pens were crucial in letting the viewer know what they were looking at. Now that they're official sets, they have a logo to get that idea across, plus the tweak of adding a folding stand and a hole to hang it on a wall. In a way, it echoes real life. The artist draws the image on a table surface, and the patron frames it for display. You don't buy a piece of art and then lay it on a shelf with a bunch of pens around it.
@tarnizhed_bricks:
Yes, but those were his MOCs from before he got hired to work in Billund. So far the only four official sets we've seen any mention of are the ones that got posted last week. Any future sets are still under wraps. Toothless is an extreme long shot because they've never had any Dreamworks IP under license prior to Trolls 2. Link is also unlikely at this point, until/unless Mario does well.
I love the skeletor! What is the chance of its official release?
Really insightful interview. Great questions and elaborate answers. Thanks for that!
If the Link and Skeletor sketches ever make it into sets I'd buy them in a heartbeat.
Still wish they included the pens for that little bit of extra display potential, though...
Luckily they seem pretty straightforward to whip up yourself.
@elisewong18 said:
"I love the skeletor! What is the chance of its official release?"
Zero chance. Skeletor, like the rest of the Masters of the Universe franchise, belongs to one of Lego's biggest competitors, Mattel. And barring Mattel going into bankruptcy and having to sell off some of their biggest IP or even shut down entirely,, there's pretty much no chance of them licensing that to a direct competitor.
Eventually, perhaps a version of 41597 - “Go-Sketch-Me”
It’d be like making an identikit!
In the future it would be nice to hear a little more about his background. I am aware of Chris and a little about what he was doing before LEGO employed him but would be fun to hear more of his journey to this point.
Great designer. I have some of his smaller custom stuff.
Really looking forward to MORE of his official Lego creations. He's gonna bring new ideas to the table I'm sure.
Great job man. I prefer these to the Brickheadz, no offense to the creator.
@Lyichir:
Complicating things even further, Mattel bought MegaBloks a few years back, so they've actually started releasing their own sets.
" all humanoids would have faces that are 10 studs wide". So we can expect non-humanoid characters in the future? I would be shocked if BB-8 and R2-D2 are not done eventually.
Also, I love Chris McVeigh's Christmas ornaments. I really hope they release a series of those in the future.
Although Lego mosaic have being around for a while, its nice to be able to use the triangular plates to create sharper edges and can also layer to create some 3D depth, especially for doing noses and the clever 90 degree twist for the jokers mouth. I can see how these would look great on bedroom doors, please could you add some female characters in the next round. This will also probably inspire artists to try larger pictures, allowing finer details and more contrasts.