Throwback Thursday: LEGO® brick Hot Air Balloon

This week’s model, Ryan’s beautiful rainbow coloured hot-air balloon, is a bit different in that Ryan built it purely for himself and just for the challenge of it!

Building a pattern into a complex compounding curving shape like a balloon in LEGO is about as hard as it gets. Ryan started by getting the shape for the balloon right, with the rounded dome top and slow tapering bottom that the basket hangs from.

Beyond the shape, the pattern of spiralling rainbow colours proved even harder than Ryan thought because the colours he wanted to use, including Lavender and the Bright Orange colours, were both very new at that stage and had very limited parts ranges to work with.

But as you can see he got there in the end and to cap it off, managed to make the model strong enough to hang from the ceiling with a minifig scaled basket underneath!

The Hot-Air Balloon tours with our travelling Brickman Experience so you can see it when it comes next near you!
Watch Ryan talk about building the model: