Today Hot Report

The 35-year-old New Yorker makes a six-figure living as a Lego artist, creating large-scale works of art using tens of thousands of the plastic pieces. Among his recent projects are a 10-foot-tall replica of the new Trump Tower being constructed in Dubai for Donald Trump, and a four-foot-tall bumblebee commissioned by Fall Out Boy bass guitarist Pete Wentz as a gift for his new bride, pop star Ashlee Simpson. He says he receives hundreds of commission inquiries every month.

Though he played with Legos like most kids, they were the furthest thing from his mind when he set out in the working world. After graduating with a law degree from New York University in 1998, Sawaya became a Wall Street attorney, earning a comfortable six-figure salary—and working in a high-stress environment. To relax after long hours at the office, he would work on art projects at night, making sculptures using clay at first, then moving into more whimsical media, like candy.

One of Sawaya’s first hobbyist projects with Legos was an eight-foot-tall pencil. Friends would come over to gawk at it, and Sawaya eventually set up a website, brickartist.com, to post photos of his creations. Visitors to the site sent in requests, such as Lego renderings of portraits of their children.

The hobby became the real thing in 2004 after he won a competition sponsored by Lego to find the best builder in the U.S. He quit his job and became one of Lego’s “master model builders,” creating sculptures for its theme park in San Diego. They paid him just $13 an hour, but it gave him good training for when he returned to New York to create his own Lego works full-time.

Sawaya now keeps 1.5 million Lego bricks, meticulously organized by shape and color into clear bins (he buys all his Legos in bulk). He sketches his projects first on something called “brick paper”—essentially, graph paper modified for Lego shapes—and takes anywhere from a few days to a few months to build them. At any given time, he’s working on three or four projects, earning anywhere from a couple thousand dollars up to six figures per work.

Yes, kiddos, it is true. You too can start out making office supplies out of LEGOs and earn a six-figure salary.