I have asked some LCPs to share their story about why and how they became a LEGO Certified Professional. Dirk Denoyelle who has been an LCP for 11 years agreed to share his history. If you want to know more about Dirk please visit this site here.
Back to Dirks story....
When I approached LEGO Belgium sometime in 1999, I was a pretty well known comedian and voice actor in Belgium. I was looking for a K8 full of light grey bricks to build the head of local singer and sculptor Willem Vermandere, to be used in my next comedy show. Much to my surprise, LEGO agreed to give me the bricks. They literally said “we get a hundred requests a year, and we grant one. This year, we’ll do yours” 🙂 So I was very, very lucky !
I built the head, used it in my shows and people just loved it.
Almost ten years, 30 heads and numerous mosaics later, I bumped into Jan Beyer, and explained my plans to maybe make this building of LEGO portraits my second offical business. Jan introduced me to the LCP program. I applied, and two months later I was the seventh LCP in the world - together with Adam Reed Tucker and Beth Weiss.
I founded Amazings - actually named after my wife Amaya, making Amazings stand for “Amaya’s things"- and started doing whatever project that crossed my path. The original idea was to focus on building heads and mosaics, but it soon became clear the market was not ready for that. Or better: not willing to pay the price. We all know building with LEGO bricks is a slow process, and if you have to make a living out of it, time is money… So Amazings took on other kinds of projects. A scale model of a machine for a trade fair. Some give-aways for a product launch where I was also the Master of Ceremony. A scale model of the towers of Ghent. The occasional piece of art…
And then I was asked by an agency in Bratislava (Slovakia): if they can put my work on display in a shopping mall ? Of course they can !
As demand grows, Amazings takes on more people and moves from my home to a ground floor appartment, and then to a three story building.
Today Amazings can look back on hundreds of projects for a wide variety of clients, be it a local farmer or a Norwegian billionaire, a small enterprise in Brussels or the Hilton Opera Hotel in Paris. We even built the entire city of Almere in Holland. The fine art we created over the past 20 years also resulted in a 2000 m2 exhibit.
I also am a certified LEGO Serious Play coach and have done team buildings with the bricks in Europe, the US and Asia. And yes, I still performs as a comedian and motivational speaker - once a comedian, always a comedian!
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