Little Coloured Bricks

Almost 10 years ago, an American author, artist, and atheist, began a web project called The Brick Testament. The said project is a selection of Bible stories told through photographs of dioramas made from Lego blocks. When it first came out, it featured six narratives from the book of Genesis and since then, The Brick Testament has covered more than 400 stories using more than 4000 images. A hardbound book version of the web project has also been released. Both the web project and the books were made available to the public for the use of churches and anti-church groups making the Brick Testament a rather popular Lego diorama.

The narration of the stories is basically straightforward, although its creator did give a little more attention to the elements in the story that contain sex, destruction, and violence. However, the images frequently make a piercingly ironic comment on the words, especially on passages that are instructional.

For instance, the photographs used to tell the Ten Commandments oddly choose to put at the forefront the primary capital nature of the transgressions as shown in the scene. One glaring example is the command to not put up with fake prophets is put side by side with sights of the Jews appropriating the passage to Jesus.

The photographs in The Brick Testament are those of dioramas made from the creator’s own collection of Legos. In some of the cases where modifications are done to the Lego pieces, the adjustments are just simple alterations created with markers and hobby knives. An example of these modifications is God’s hair which the creator of the Brick Testament made by carving a white Lego helmet piece. The only entirely non-Lego element in the dioramas is the sky in the background. The artist also sometimes added speech balloons and edited the photographs using image editing computer programs like Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop.