Lego, the coloured bricks children have been playing with since 1958, can also be a form of art. And in the field of Lego art, there’s a man who deserves the title of “Pablo Picasso of Lego”.

His name is Angus MacLane and his day job is one of those that causes envy and admiration at the same time. Angus is an animator at Pixar and he’s one of the masters behind movies like Toy Story (2 and 3), Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E and a bunch of others.

When he’s not working on the next 3d animation blockbuster, he turns into a manic Lego builder. In the community of Lego fans he’s regarded as a superstar and his series of creations called CubeDudes is considered a real work of art.

CubeDudes are small abstract versions of iconic characters made of Lego bricks. MacLane says it takes 15 minutes to build one and he explained the genesis of the idea: “Sadly, I have a variety of restrictions when it comes to Lego building.  I don’t have a lot of room to build anything large.  I don’t have a lot of free time to build so I wanted to find something to make that didn’t take very long to complete.  I had just seen G.I.Joe: Resolute and I was inspired to make a ‘Snake Eyes’ in Lego.  I know there were a few ‘Snake Eyes’ Mini-Figs out there on the Internet but I’m not really into decals.  So I thought about making him in Mini-Land scale.  I started building the head and realized that with the eye pieces a 3×3 scale would look much better than a 2×2 scale.  I then thought that having him super-deformed would be much more appealing.  After I finished Snake Eyes, well I needed a Storm Shadow so… and I just kept going“.

The artist posted an impressive collection of his CubeDudes on Flickr: hehe says: “I average about two a day. I’ve been working on this for over 4 months so that’s why I have about 100 now“.

You can read an in-depth interview with MacLane here.