443 - Furniture

Now that my build has progressed to the point where I can make adjustments to the living room, I have been spending most of my time building the living room furniture.



Furniture building can be a very simple or very complex process depending on what you need done. There are simple and obvious ways to create couches and chairs, coffee tables and dining room tables, even shelves and cabinets. Then there are complex ways to do the very same things.



Deciding which route (simple or complex) to go, I feel, is the challenge. The important thing is to not sacrifice scale for detail. An ornate piece of furniture won't sit well in a living room filled with other furniture much bigger or smaller than it.



Another thing I've learnt to do is to use color as texture. Little breaks in the color scheme can give the impression of texture, so you don't have to worry as much about complex curves or complicated detailing.



And like a good on screen adaptation of a book, you need to know where to take creative liberties based on the medium. In other words, don't be so caught up in staying "true to the original" that you end up with something less than desirable.



I've also found that you have to be constantly willing to evaluate and change as you build. Compare the antique wooden safe above (brown and gold on the left) to two other versions of it pictured in other pictures in this post. I've yet to decide what I like best, or that I've even found one that will be in my final version.



What I do know is that I shouldn't consider anything done just because I've built it. Unlike other "true" arts, LEGO is a medium that allows for decisions to be reversed. I'm never locked into doing something a certain way, and I certainly don't need to start from scratch if I've made a mistake. As someone who learns a lot through trial and error, this is something that highlights why I loved as a child, and have come to love as an adult, this great hobby.

The Dark Tower - Resumption

WARNING: This post may contain spoilers from Stephen King's The Dark Tower (series of books).

It has been just under a month since my last post, and indeed, my last work on The Dark Tower. Part of the reason has to do with having to wait on pieces to arrive (and the pieces I needed to continue just arrived two days ago), but the other has to do with my mood and inspiration.

I've been watching Game of Thrones quite avidly recently, and it has inspired me to spend a little more time in the world of fantasy as opposed to the world of doors, windows and pink tiles.



The build of The Dark Tower resumes with a new design for the 2nd half of the tower. My challenge here was to find a way to allow the 2nd half to have different textures and eventually build towards a smaller octagon and pointed/domed roof. This new pictured octagonal design is different from the previous in that it connects to a smaller internal octagon, as opposed to an octagon connected by a cross just on 4 sides of the octagon in the previous version. I use wedge plates to fill in the gaps where there would otherwise be holes in the design.

Gone is the circle design I attempted in my last post. In its place is something much more sturdy and that has much more room for me to style and design.

While it may not seem like much now, the new base will allow me to greatly vary up the design of the 2nd half, breaking the monotony and formality of the bottom half. It sets the foundation for what should be a very exciting and very different top half.

443 - Pink Kitchen

Yes, pink. Actually, bright pink to be exact.

As you can imagine, pink (and shades of pink) is a hard LEGO color to come by. I ended up ordering these bright pink tiles from the Netherlands for what ended up to be a very reasonable price of around 9 cents a piece. The color isn't my first choice, but paying $1 per piece to get the rarer regular pink just wasn't something I was willing to do.



Still, the end result works, I think. The brightness of the pink is dulled by the walls and the cabinetry, and will be further dulled once the furniture is moved in.



As you can tell, I have more work to do, including replacing the light bluish gray bricks with proper cabinets, and I also need to come up with a better washing machine which is what that strange white contraption near the oven/stove is supposed to be.





I'm pretty happy with how it all has turned out; the colors don't exactly match the original colors in the actual kitchen, but they come pretty close.



I've also begun construction on the rest of the first level, completing the foundations of the house. The dimensions seem to work out well in minifigure scale, even if they don't exactly match the actual scale.



What I need to do now is to calculate what I need to finish the walls of the bottom level so that I can begin work on the top, and eventually the roof... which I can promise you now is NOT pink.

443 - Corrections and Calculations

The thing about building a model in LEGO is that you are somewhat constricted to working with the LEGO scale.

While there are certainly tricks to achieve fractions and to fill spaces smaller than a standard LEGO brick or plate, these tricks often have trade offs, like using 3 pieces where you might want to just use 1, thus forcing you to increase the depth in order to adjust the width, or using other tricks to hide an unsightly portion of your build.



I've recently had to add 8 more studs into my planned foundation in order to accommodate for the furnishings.





The extra space was something I was trying to avoid, if only for not stretching out the budget. Outside of that though, I was trying to make some compromises in terms of accuracy in order to get the chance to use certain building techniques.



One thing I'm still not sure about is the glass wall that is shared by the kitchen and also the front entranceway. The angle is right, but the design I feel could still be improved. The problem is I am limited by space. The wall itself can only be so long, so thick and so wide. I'd like to get more glass bricks in there, but I don't want to lose track of the original design in doing so. The scribbles in the first picture are part of my attempt to do just that.



Throughout the process, I keep referring back to the pictures my other so kindly took for me as reference points. I find that I need these visual references while building. Even for The Dark Tower, I try to look up imagery of castles and towers. I've found that my LEGO creativity is more suited to problem-solving than it is to genuine inspiration.

The build continues and I am pleased with the look, if not the progress (how I envy those with the time and/or the speed of thought for large builds). Nonetheless, I should start receiving more pieces in the mail over the next few days which will really flesh out the rest of the house.

443 - Modularity

One challenge that I face as a LEGO enthusiast is dealing with building, storage and display space.

Since I am still relatively new to the hobby (just under 4 months), I don't really have an optimal setup for building, storing or displaying LEGO. I make do currently with my dining room table as my build space, with the pieces in plastic carts and containers that stay in a closet until I bring them out to the dining room when I start building. As for display, The Dark Tower sits on top of a living room bookshelf... and that's about all the display space I have short of random shelf space for small items.



So I knew before starting 443 that I had to make it easy to move and store in small segments, even if the combined work would be much bigger. I opted to go with 16 x 32 segments that could be connected via Technic pins.

Building this house in segments did present a unique building experience. I had to plan the build based on the fact that the modules could be separated, so it became important to ensure that there were no elements that would cross over into another module in a way that would cause for an awkward build.



An unexpected (for me anyway) plus to this though was that it allowed for much easier access to various parts of the house that would otherwise be hard to photograph or play with. I am finding that I can (and will eventually) put in a lot more detail into the house because the details can be appreciated, module by module.



The build itself is coming along well. I like the colors that I will get a chance to use; sand red, dark tan and even pink will be featured as soon as the parts arrive; and that's just the first floor!

I very much want to experiment with mixing in dark orange alongside the dark red for a more unique brick effect, but my budget may not allow that. As it is, I will have to wait until next month before being able to get the white tiles needed to finish the floor of the first level.

In any case, the build continues, slowly, but surely. I may take a break from this soon to switch gears back to The Dark Tower while I wait for my latest piece orders to arrive, but my heart is here, in this home, and I hope to preserve memories of my childhood in it.

443 - Teaser

When I first got back into LEGO, there were two immediate projects that came to mind. The first was to make a model of the black VW Beetle that I drive. The second involved building a model of my childhood home.

443 is the street address/unit number of the two-story, self-standing, shared-wall condominium I grew up in. My parents moved there when I was still a toddler, and they live there still, but they are close to selling it in order to move to a home more appropriate for them (given that their children have flown the coop).

I have many great memories of this place. And now, as I try to recreate it, I am reminded of them, and also I am amazed at how beautiful it is when stripped from nostalgic memory. My mother - amateur interior decorator and occasional antique furniture collector - did much to make our home distinctive, and I think that it did take a part (even if a small one) in what I consider to be a happy childhood.

As you can tell, I've been prompted to start work on this, given the impending sale of the house. Pictured above is the incomplete first half of the base of the house. You see the driveway and main entrance to the house. Don't mind Gandalf who is helping me with the scaling. Also ignore the fact that I'm in need of more white tiles. ;)

To do: the 2nd half of the base, which features the living room (and all my mother's unique furnishings), kitchen and back porch/patio, and all of the upper level which features 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.

Stay tuned!

Micro Build Diagon Alley

My most recent endeavor is yet another interesting challenge; this time, the idea of building on a micro scale, and focusing on imitation and editing.



Diagon Alley is a $150 LEGO set based on the location of the same name within the Harry Potter universe. I picked it as my entry for the ToysNBricks.com Micro Build Tournament. The idea is to take an existing set and create a miniature version of it using less than 200 pieces.

I picked Diagon Alley not only based on my affinity for the actual set (which has beautiful build techniques and colors), but also because I wanted to challenge myself to take a large set and boil it down into something that has the same look and feel, but uses just 10% of the pieces of the original.



My initial build had me at somewhere close to 350 pieces. Almost twice the number of pieces required as a limit. My daunting task from there was figuring out what elements could be removed or combined to edit the piece down without losing detail or straying too far from the original.



I also had to make construction choices that would be less than desirable in other circumstances. My instinct would be to reinforce the build in certain locations to prevent the buildings from falling apart too easily, but those extra foundation pieces added unnecessarily to the piece count. From there, it became a matter of picking and choosing where I had room to add some detailing and flair to the buildings.













This was certainly an interesting challenge and one that I found thoroughly enjoyable and fulfilling.