Best of BrickNerd: Weekend Highlight — Article originally published December 19, 2021.

Today I have the great pleasure of shining a spotlight on a LEGO builder in the community that has a pretty unique style in both theme and presentation when it comes to his MOCs. His name is Bart De Dobbelaer and I’ve been following his work for quite some time now. It’s always a treat when one of his builds shows up in my Flickr feed and it’s almost impossible to not instantly see that he’s the man behind a particular build. So I thought it would be fun to showcase some of them here, in case anyone missed him over the years. If so, you’re in for a treat (a somewhat scary one, but still a treat).

I reached out to Bart and asked him a bit about his process, what inspires him and what got him in to the hobby. So enjoy!

Andreas: Hi dude, thank you for taking the time to tell us a bit more about yourself and your builds! So who are you, in the real world?

Bart: Hi, I’m Bart De Dobbelaer. I’m 44 years old, married with a wife, have four kids between 13 and 18. I’m working as a developer (C++, python, typescript) for an AI company designing medical software for all brain disorders—my specialty is in hospital integrations.

Andreas: Would you mind telling us a bit more about what inspires you, or what you enjoy building?

Bart: My builds always come from my own mind, I tend to stay away from known themes or pop culture with the exception of two builds I did during Iron Builder some time ago. Nowadays I get a lot of inspiration from artwork, both science fiction and fantasy. I always try to create a world, a backdrop, a story into the build.

Andreas: So what got you back into the wonderful world of LEGO?

Bart: I started out in 2010 when the Atlantis theme came out—that pulled me out of my dark ages. Then I did about 4-5 years of story builds where I would create a vignette daily/weekly which was part of a bigger storyline. That always took a lot of preparation and by the end, after 3-4 months, building in the same style I got bored. So around 2015 I decided to only build single builds, still telling a story.

I ran a BrickLink store from 2014 to 2017—in the end, that killed the hobby for me as I was busy with LEGO all day long but not the building anymore. I came out of my second dark ages when COVID-19 hit, like so many among us. Been at it since Summer 2020

A big thank you to Bart for giving us some additional insight about his builds. Make sure you check out some of the other unique creations on his Flickr or Instagram—you won’t be disappointed!

What are some of the more unique LEGO builds that you have seen? Let us know in the comments below.

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