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Dalek

The Daleks are among the most famous villains from the long-running television show Doctor Who. They appear to be robots, but they are actually vehicles for small, ugly creatures evolved from humanoid Kaleds. They famously shout "exterminate!" in electronic voices as they repeatedly try to kill or enslave all other intelligent life forms.

LEGO

LEGO bricks are among the coolest toys on Earth. Little plastic bricks that lock firmly together with little pegs, available in a wide variety of shapes. Building recognizable models with them is a bit like doing origami or tangrams, especially when you restrict yourself to a small number of pieces.

LEGO Dalek

The distinctive shape of the Dalek shell is hard to model in LEGO parts, due to the many strange angles and curves. Modeling it in the same scale as the standard LEGO people known as "minifigs" is even harder. I allowed myself some compromises: my model is the right height, but it's too thin. The eyestalk swivels up and down properly, but the head is not flat enough. The arm ends in a claw instead of a suction cup, and the gun is missing entirely. The skirt is smooth, not faceted and covered with rows of small hemispheres. Indeed, most of the details are wrong or missing; the overall silhouette is approximately right, but not exactly.

Despite those flaws, I'm pretty happy with this model. It's made of only six pieces, yet it's quite recognizable as a Dalek. It would be easy to build a small army of them to menace your minifigs.

Postscript

I'm aware of a few other people who have made minifig-scale LEGO Daleks. When I designed mine (almost a year ago), I had seen this one, which looks good but requires cutting and gluing of LEGO parts. That's cheating, in my opinion. More recently, this one and this one appeared. I think those are better than mine: more accurate proportions, more realistic details. This one is pretty good too (and that TARDIS is great!).