Book FAQ

The path that led me to this hobby was definitely unusual. Most AFOLs (adult fans of LEGO) can trace their affinity for the eponymous plastic bricks back to their childhood days. But I grew up in India, and was oblivious to LEGO until I moved to the US as a young adult. Even as an adult, although I was vaguely familiar with LEGO, I never managed to get my hands on any actual bricks until I was already a dad in my 40s.

I discovered this hobby in 2016 thanks to my daughter who was then 5 years old. She had been playing with a LEGO Creative Bucket that she received as a birthday gift and she wanted me to help her build “a really tall building” using LEGO. We started off by simply stacking all the bricks she had, to create a nondescript tower. But this got me wondering what it would take to use these colorful plastic bricks to build something more recognizable like the Empire State Building.

A few quick online searches opened my eyes to the wonderful world of LEGO, all the official sets and, of course, the vast array of custom models built by LEGO fans around the world. At first, it was hard to believe that the large, detailed and intricate LEGO creations I saw online were built using the same little toy bricks that my daughter had been playing with.

I was intrigued by the possibilities LEGO offered as a creative medium. I’ve always had a keen interest in skyscrapers and other architectural landmarks from around the world, and I wondered if I would be able to use LEGO to build my own versions of these amazing structures. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I found myself diving headlong into this new hobby and planning my very first LEGO build.

Out of all the models that had caught my eye online, two in particular stood out. One was the version of the Empire State Building built by Sean Kenney (and displayed for a period of time at the top of the real building) and the other, a version of the Taj Mahal built by Arthur Gugick (which had preceded the official version released by LEGO). I was blown away by both these models, and while I had no idea what was involved in creating them, I was absolutely determined to find out.

When I talk about diving headlong into this hobby, I really mean it. Within the span of a few weeks, I went from never having touched a single LEGO piece to designing my own LEGO model using several thousand pieces! It helped that this hobby did not require much of a learning curve, and that there were no new skills to learn. Building a LEGO model is as simple as joining bricks by clicking them together, which is quite literally, child’s play.

The design of my first model (a 6-foot tall version of the Empire State Building), however, required quite a bit of research and planning. As an engineer, I was already familiar with the concepts of scale and proportion, and so it was a matter of finding the dimensions of the real building (using Google Earth and other online sources) and translating them into LEGO dimensions for my model (I have outlined the details of this process in the book).

The first cut of my model used fairly basic techniques that I was able to figure out intuitively, like stacking bricks with overlaps, alternating the orientation of bricks between odd and even layers, etc. I enjoyed the experience so much that I couldn’t wait to move on to the other New York skyscrapers I admired like the Chrysler Building, 70 Pine Street, 40 Wall Street and the Hearst Tower.

Each of these presented unique challenges (for instance, the distinctive crown of the Chrysler with its cascading arches and the green sloping roof of 40 Wall Street) that spurred my growth as a builder and led me to discover more advanced building techniques like half-stud offsets, SNOT, etc. I was even able to revisit my model of the Empire State Building later on, to add more details to the top and bottom sections using these advanced techniques.

By 2019, I had a portfolio of 5 large skyscraper models using a total of over 100K pieces and this ended up becoming a banner year for me. I was able to display my skyscraper models in two different LEGO shows (Brickfest Philadelphia and Brickfair Virginia) and they were also featured in print (Brick Journal, Blocks) as well as online (Beyond the Brick, The Brothers Brick, etc.) publications.

Unfortunately, this was also the last time that I was able to make it to a LEGO show in person. I stayed away for a few years following that due to concerns over COVID, and then, once I started working on the book, it was harder to make the time for shows. Hopefully, I can actually make it to some LEGO shows in 2025.

Some of you may know me as Deep Shen (even if you don’t, that is OK) which is an abbreviated version of my real name. When I started posting pictures of my LEGO builds on social media, I wanted to maintain a certain degree of anonymity. I didn’t know anyone personally that was into LEGO, and I was almost embarrassed to bring up LEGO in conversations with my family, friends and colleagues. I just didn’t know what they would think about a middle-aged guy who had suddenly found an interest in a children’s toy.

My misgivings in those early days were reinforced whenever friends and family stumbled upon the LEGO models in my house. Even after I told them about my new hobby, they would compliment my daughter for being very talented, assuming that she had built these models with my help (when in fact, it was the other way around!). It was only after I attended a few LEGO shows and met other people like me, that I started to get a little more comfortable in my skin as an adult fan of LEGO. But by then, the name Deep Shen had stuck.

Another reason I chose to remain in the shadows and let my LEGO creations speak for themselves is that I am an introvert by nature, and I have never been too comfortable putting myself in the spotlight. However, now that I have written a book using my own real name, I realize that I can no longer expect to remain completely anonymous.

The precursor to the book was a blog that I started during the lockdown in 2020. With a lot of free time on my hands during the early days of the pandemic, I decided to try branching out a bit from skyscraper models. One model that had always been at the back of my mind was Arthur Gugick’s Taj Mahal. Now that I had more building experience under my belt, I felt that I was ready to take on the challenge of creating my own version of the Taj Mahal.

Designing a model of the Taj Mahal turned out to be an entirely different ball of wax. Unlike skyscraper models that are made up of simple rectilinear shapes for the most part, the Taj Mahal has a variety of curved shapes including the minarets, which are essentially cylinders, and the main dome which is a truncated sphere sitting atop a drum, which is a round wall. I needed to familiarize myself with a host of new techniques in order to build these round shapes using LEGO.

While I was able to glean information about building round shapes from various online sources, it was scattered across the web and not always easy to find. I thought it would benefit other LEGO builders to have all of this information collected in one place. That is how my first blog post on building techniques (titled ‘Squaring the Circle – Building Round Shapes Using LEGO’) came together. In addition to outlining the various techniques for building round shapes, I was able to provide my own perspectives gained from designing and building my model of the Taj Mahal.

This article was reposted on Bricknerd giving it greater visibility within the LEGO community. I followed that up with articles covering some of the other building techniques I had used in my skyscraper models including half-stud offsets, sideways building (SNOT), and angled walls. Eventually, I felt that I had enough material to put together a general guide on advanced building techniques (I just wasn’t sure what shape it was going to take).

As someone who got started in this hobby pretty much from scratch, I always wished that there was a single reference guide I could consult for everything from the basics to some of the more advanced building techniques. If the book could give me at least an overview of everything that was possible with LEGO, I could use that information as a jumping-off point for further exploration. I just didn’t think I would be the one writing such a book.

The LEGO books currently on the market are mostly filled with pictures of colorful models, and some even have step-by-step instructions for building these models. But if you want to build something entirely of your creation, you are usually out of luck. The book that comes closest to a general guide is ‘The Unofficial LEGO Builder’s Guide‘ released by No Starch Press back in 2006. The second edition of the book which was released in 2012 did not add a lot of new content. This was an excellent resource when it came out, but clearly a lot has changed in the 18 years since it was released (the catalog of LEGO pieces has expanded greatly, and a number of new building techniques have been developed). For instance, sideways building (SNOT) is a popular technique used in both official sets as well as MOCs but most of the pieces used for SNOT did not even exist when the book originally came out.

No Starch Press that I mentioned earlier is a publisher that focuses primarily on books about programming, networking, computer security, etc., but their catalog also includes a line of LEGO books (I own several of them myself). If you go to their website, you will see that they are open to book proposals from prospective authors. They are very transparent about their contract and what writing a book for them would entail. On a sudden whim, I decided to send in a proposal for a book on advanced building techniques (it took me just 10-15 minutes to put this proposal together).

The publisher got back to me within a few days, which caught me totally by surprise. They were in fact, looking for someone to write a successor to their ‘The Unofficial LEGO Builder’s Guide’ which clearly was getting a little out of date. They asked if I could expand the scope of my proposed book to also include basic information about the LEGO system, and I agreed without much hesitation. I also offered to add chapters covering LEGO mosaics and sculptures, because I felt that a general guide to LEGO would be incomplete without some information about these types of computer-assisted builds.

The book has a total of 9 chapters, out of which 4 were essentially reworked from my blog articles. The remaining 5 chapters were written completely from scratch. The first 3 chapters are devoted to basic information related to the LEGO system, the concepts of scale and proportion, and simple building techniques like overlapping bricks to create a sturdy structure, offsetting them to create a taper and so on. The next 4 chapters, which are based on my blog posts, cover building techniques that are more advanced (such as half-stud offsets, sideways building aka SNOT, angled walls, and round shapes). The last 2 chapters delve into LEGO mosaics and sculptures respectively.

The book definitely has more text than the typical LEGO book, but I have also included plenty of illustrations and examples from my own LEGO models, as well as official sets. If you prefer to build your LEGO models digitally using Bricklink Studio, you will also appreciate the various digital building tips that can also be found throughout the book.

Once I knew that I was going to be writing about LEGO mosaics and sculptures, I was in a bit of a panic. I realized that I didn’t know much about them myself, beyond the fact that they are typically designed using software. Like most people, I didn’t have a good understanding of what happens under the hood of the software used to generate mosaics and sculptures. If I was going to be writing about these types of LEGO builds, I wanted to make sure that I actually knew what I was talking about.

I therefore took it upon myself to get a good understanding of the process involved in the creation of LEGO mosaics and sculptures, so that I could demystify it for the readers of my book. The best way to do that was to brush up on my coding skills, and create my own programs to generate LEGO mosaics and sculptures.

The programs that I developed ended up matching or exceeding the capabilities of other commonly available software. My mosaic program can generate different types of mosaics (studs out, studs up and lenticular) using bricks, plates or tiles. I also incorporated the ability to divide the mosaic into custom-sized sections and optimize it by combining pieces within each individual section (this is obviously not possible when round elements are used).

My sculpture program also supports different types of sculptures – studs-up (using bricks, plates, or a combination) and studs-out and exceeds the capabilities of Studio (for studs-up sculptures) and Lsculpt (for studs-out sculptures).

The target audience for the book is adults and maybe older teens who are interested in creating their own LEGO models. This is definitely not a book for younger kids, or one that you can flip through to get ideas for LEGO models you can build. It does not have step-by-step instructions for building any specific models, either. However, if you already have some ideas for models you would like to design and build, this book can help you realize them.

Instead of telling you what to build, the book provides you with the information and tools you need to be able to design and build your own LEGO models. The chapters of the book are organized in a logical order with each chapter building on the concepts that were covered in the previous chapters. I am hoping that after reading this book, you will come away with a better understanding of the LEGO system, the various building techniques you can use, and why each technique works the way that it does. This should come in handy as you move beyond LEGO models built using canned instructions, and take a first step towards creating your own LEGO models.

I understand that this book may contain more information than most people can digest in a single reading. I expect readers to use this book as a handy reference that they can come back to, as many times as they need, over the course of their LEGO journey.

I will be the first to admit that I am not a LEGO expert by any stretch of the imagination. There are numerous builders in the LEGO community that are far more talented than me. I always find inspiration and of course, something new to learn from each of the amazing builds they create.

However, as an engineer who discovered this hobby later in life, I feel that I bring a slightly different perspective to it. My background helps me better appreciate the math underlying the LEGO system, concepts like scale and proportion, the geometry of LEGO pieces, etc. and how all these come into play when you are designing a LEGO model. At a high level, this hobby may involve joining colorful plastic bricks in various ways to build interesting models. But you can also approach the design of a LEGO model methodically, as a series of problems to be solved. The various building techniques are, of course, the possible solutions to these problems (and sometimes there is more than one solution that works).

While there is no shortage of information related to LEGO building techniques available online, and in LEGO magazines like Brick Journal and Blocks, my contribution with this book is to collect as much of this information as possible in one place, and to organize it in an order that makes sense. I have also tried to provide background information and other insights into each technique that you would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. My hope is that this book will serve as a reference guide for everyone from a novice to an experienced builder.

While I chose not to talk about the book on social media until now, several people in the LEGO community have been aware of it for some time.  As soon as I had a tentative table of contents for the book, I reached out to 7-8 LEGO builders I respected to get their opinions. The feedback that they provided greatly helped shape the contents of the book. Later on, when I had a rough draft of the entire book, again, I sent it to a few people whose opinions I greatly valued, to get their feedback. The changes they suggested definitely helped make this a better book.

I was fortunate enough to have the editors of 3 of the biggest LEGO publications involved in the creation of this book. It was a great honor to have Joe Meno (the creator and long-time editor of Brick Journal) read a rough draft of the book and write the foreword for it. Graham Hancock (the editor of Blocks) kindly agreed to do a technical review of the book and his suggestions proved to be invaluable. Last but not least, Dave Schefcik, the editor of Bricknerd has been instrumental in publishing my blog articles on his website, and this book probably would not have been possible without his support over the years. He was also involved throughout the process, reviewing the table of contents, early drafts of the book, and helping me find some of the images that ended up in the book.

Looking at it in the rearview mirror, the overall process of writing the book doesn’t seem so bad. But that is not to understate how much of a time commitment it required. Things did get a little stressful at times, especially since I took on the responsibility of creating all the images, as well as the index (things I could have probably outsourced). I was also actively involved in creating the layout of the book, as well as its cover. But throughout the process, I felt that I was in good hands with the folks at No Starch Press because they were always easy to work with, and very good at what they did. 

I had originally started working on the book in the middle of 2022 with the release date scheduled for late 2023. But within a few months, it became clear that there was no way we were going to be done in time for a 2023 release (the supply chain issues caused by COVID were continuing to affect the publishing industry). It was a little disappointing to see the release date pushed out by an entire year, but in retrospect, this was a blessing in disguise. The additional time allowed me to get a more in-depth understanding of LEGO mosaics and sculptures, and to further refine the content of all the other chapters.

The whole experience of writing a book was quite unlike what I had imagined. I didn’t find myself sitting at a desk for hours on end, typing words endlessly into a Word document. I didn’t have that kind of time to spare anyway, given that I was juggling writing the book with a full-time job, and other personal/family commitments. What worked best for me was typing notes consisting of just one or two sentences into a note-taking app. These were just random tidbits of information that came to mind on each of the topics I was writing about. It greatly helped to be able to access these notes from anywhere, on whatever device I had with me at the time (I probably used my phone for this much more than my laptop).

When I had enough of these notes to cover everything I wanted to say on a particular subject, I would start arranging them in the right order, grouping them into paragraphs with the proper transitions, and editing them to create a complete chapter that I could then transfer to Word. Most chapters required two or three rounds of edits (and sometimes rewrites) before they were ready to be sent to No Starch for the developmental edit.

The developmental editing phase took the better part of the time I spent working on the book. I would send a rough manuscript of each chapter to my developmental editor, and he would send it back marked with his suggested changes. When I got the first chapter back from him, I was a little shocked by the extent of the changes he had suggested. But as I spent more time reviewing the changes, it became clear to me how much these changes improved the quality of my text – sometimes even subtle changes made a big difference. Also, developmental editing isn’t only about fixing the sentence structure, grammar and punctuation. The editor also suggested changes to how the material in each chapter was organized, and in some cases, he even did his own research to come up with a better way to introduce or discuss a particular building technique. In the end, I think the developmental edit made this a far better book than I could have created on my own.

After the developmental editing was completed, the remaining steps (copy editing, proofreading, reviewing the layout of the actual book, etc.) didn’t take quite as long. This entire experience gave me a whole new appreciation for the professionals in the publishing industry, and everything they do to bring each new book to market. It also made me more aware of my own shortcomings as a writer (something that will hopefully stand me in good stead in the future). Lastly, I was able to pick up a few new skills along the way (using Adobe tools like Illustrator and InDesign as well as some of the advanced features in Microsoft Word).

One regret I have is that my dad didn’t get to see the release of this book. My dad and my granddad before him were prolific writers, but they didn’t have any luck getting anything published outside of local newspapers and magazines. I always believed (and I still do) that the writing genes had skipped a generation with me. I’ve never been much into reading, let alone writing. It is therefore quite ironic to now find myself a published author (granted a LEGO book isn’t exactly literature). Unfortunately, my dad passed away a couple of years ago, and so I can only imagine how proud he would have been of me for this accomplishment.

Another regret is that my book doesn’t do a very good job of representing the sheer breadth of the LEGO community and the expansive range of LEGO builds out there (that includes cars, trains, ships, spaceships, castles, pop culture, etc.). Most of the examples I show in the book are from my own work, which is heavily skewed towards architecture. I had access to images of models built by several highly talented builders (thanks to Dave Schefcik at Bricknerd) that I could have used in the book, but I didn’t want to include any of these images just for the sake of including them. Given that the book drills down into specific building techniques, it wasn’t easy to provide the proper context for each model, especially in the time-frame I was working with. In the end, I felt that it was more important for me to talk about what I knew best, rather than make a token effort to cover all the bases. This is something I can definitely revisit if at some point I get the opportunity to do a second edition of this book.