LEGO Brick Sketches Super Heroes The Joker Set 40428

Product Information

The portraits are the same size as before, 12x16 studs, but more layers of pieces have been used to create the fine details and shape of the heads

Over the course of two days I built some up, I don’t have anything here with me, I came over here from Canada without any of my LEGO at all, so I built some up and presented them… it wasn’t long after that that I found out that we were going to proceed with them. That was a really exciting thing to happen to me, I was blown away by it because when you are fresh you kind of get this impression that things like this are not something that happen every day, things like this are long shots, so I feel incredibly fortunate that we decided to move forward with these products.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.

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!The character selection had to do with what the people in the team felt were strong and also what worked for licensing because that’s naturally an issue. Also what fit into the broader assortment, so not just LEL but across the entire company. All those considerations were taken in when deciding which four ones to go with.

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!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.

In the evening, with just a single desk lamp illuminating the room to side of them, they take on a completely different look when their profiles can be more clearly seen and appreciated, the Joker in particular.

35 comments on this article

Helmets are the perfect subject for this building style and I can't really fault this one at all. It's interesting to compare it to Chris McVeigh's earlier work of Captain Phasma's helmet: It's almost identical other than the colour. 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.