BrikWars is a tongue-in-cheek wargame for construction-system toys, and it does its damnedest to cover every possible genre of fantasy warfare. For this poster, I tried to do the same, with mixed success - since completion, there's been a great outcry about the omission of giant robots. What kind of fool tries to have a war without giant robots?

I get more requests for prints of this poster than for anything else I've ever done, but sadly it's not to be - LEGO is of the opinion that the fellow in the middle there bears more than a passing resemblance to their Minifigure trademark. As a result, I can't use the image for much except as an occasional surprise gift to the LEGO managers I work with from time to time. The best I can do is offer a free desktop graphic (1280 x 1024, 234k) for download.

(Thank you to everyone who's written in with helpful suggestions, but a trademark is a whole different animal from a copyright or patent, and is basically impossible to get around, legally or ethically.)

I've tried suggesting to LEGO that they should let me sell posters like this, either unofficially or in some company-sponsored way, but so far they haven't gone for it.

I went through a pretty good series of sketches for this one, it took a couple tries to figure out how to pack in all that chaos. (Special thanks to Alex Gross for help with that.)

All told, it took a pretty solid month or two to get this one finished.

It's funny to look back on these now, I can assure you that I got much better and faster at drawing minifigures once I got hired to do it full-time.

When I started this one, I was in the habit of starting with a graphite drawing, making a brownline transfer to vellum, wet-mounting it to board, and moving forward in oils.

I got this painting about half-finished that way before coming to my senses and scanning it into Painter instead. Thank goodness! I don't think I've touched a paintbrush since; I'll consider going back to physical media when science develops an "Undo" button for canvases.

The half-finished oil painting is still hanging on my studio wall; the graphite drawing now hangs in the collection of Shaun Sullivan somewhere in the depths of New Hampshire.