We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Matteson Pino a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Matteson, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Before I answer your question, let me introduce myself. My name is Matt Pino and I am a LEGO artist that has created my own custom LEGO model business: Pino Creations.

I wish I learned the digital LEGO design tools sooner. There are multiple available to the public for free and are very easy to make custom instruction booklets. My expectation was that the learning curve would be too difficult, but there came a point in which the demand came to be too much by the online community, that I just had to figure it out. Now I have 50+ custom instruction booklets on Rebrickable.com. (https://rebrickable.com/users/pino_creations/mocs/)

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

At a very young age I enjoyed building my own creations with LEGO, mostly designing weaponized mobile bases for my under-cover agents. My interest continued into high school where I built LEGO models for as many class projects that I could turn my interest into a letter grade. Fast forward to 2016, and I found myself using my talent making models for my friends as gag gifts. This was a turning point for me as I started to realize that this hobby could become a professional artistic practice, as the gift receivers started to ask for commission builds. Everything snowballed ever since, as my passion has turned into selling custom LEGO kits and organizing LEGO themed events for both public and private clients including the USO, Girl Scouts of the USA, KB Studio Chicago, museums and children’s birthday parties.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect for me, is when I come across one of my creations “in the wild” (as I call it). When I am just casually scrolling through social media sites and come across a video showing off one of my LEGO designs.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I am in no way an expert on social media… but I can share my learnings. The more you support and comment on other artists the faster your own growth with be. Personally, I never liked to comment on others work… but came to the realization how important it is to provide compliments and helpful criticisms to others. As I have always appreciated the same in return.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://flic.kr/ps/3mfVjM
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pino_creations/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/people/pino_creations/100088514012487/
• Other: https://rebrickable.com/users/pino_creations/mocs/

Image Credits
I am the creator of all the images.