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Chattanooga hosts its first Lego Fan Convention on Saturday-Sunday, May 18-19, and it’s stacking up to be an unforgettable debut with its special guest artists, interactive events and astounding Lego display models. BrickUniverse will fill the exhibit hall with galleries of life-size Lego character sculptures and intricately detailed mini cities. There will be several building zones offering thousands of Legos for visitors to let their imaginations run wild and build with the popular plastic blocks. Visitors can meet professional Lego artists, shop vendors in the Brick Merchants section or build spaceships and galaxies far, far away with Lego Star Wars-themed bricks in the Star Wars Zone. Big Brick Building is a building zone with Duplo bricks geared to young visitors.

View Lego galleries featuring amazing Lego sculptures of Santa’s Workshop, Palace in Wonderland,

Lego Mosaics, Joker’s Funhouse, Atlantis and the Golden Gate Bridge.

There is also a challenge area in which visitors are given a theme and have five minutes to build a piece representing that subject.

Award-winning Canadian Lego artist Paul Hetherington is one of the four featured brick artists coming to BrickUniverse. It’s one of about a dozen guest appearances he will make in a year. He began building with Legos at age 3, like most preschoolers, but lost interest around the age of 11, then returned to building 25 years ago when he was 22 years of age.

“I walked into a toy store, found a Lego set, and it brought on such a feeling of nostalgia that just on instinct I bought it. It changed my life. Now I make all these big models, travel around to cities and most of my friends are involved with Legos. So it has become almost a lifestyle,” he said during a phone interview from h ver, British Columbia.

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Organizers advise th tions typically sell out, s purchasing tickets in ad w c