Decoration help

[d0mka]

I am very bad at decorating my builds, not even bad but my skills are non existent. I would say I'm pretty decent at overall building chassis and intricate things,but I cant make a car at all,my pieces are limited,with not having many panels or angular pieces. Any tips on building good looking cars?

[langko]

1 hour ago, d0mka said:

my pieces are limited,with not having many panels or angular pieces. 

If you are not willing to invest in more parts then you are always going to struggle. You need lots of different types of panels, as well as connectors/beams/fle axles/bionicle teeth etc… Some system elements can also be useful in certain cases. Red/Black pieces probably have the best overall part availability/variety at the moment so I would recommend building in that colour for the best chance of success. 
As for arranging such pieces to form a good looking car, that just takes practice and lots of it… you will get better the more models you build. 

Edited February 27, 2023 by langko

[A_Forest_of_Lego]

Have you tried first building it digitally in Studio? You can then buy the parts you need after and it's a lot easier.

[Jurss]

I wouldn't recommend studio, LDD or similar digital build, especially for learning, as You can build there anything. But then truth will be faced

I would recommend starting to build official lego sets.

And yes, if You wan't to add panels etc, to Your collection, then start with red color. Black also have lot of variety, but it won't look so good.

And check this http://www.litlug.lt/

yes, they haven't updated for a wile, but they are active on social platforms etc.

[gyenesvi]

Well I would definitely recommend Studio building. It's much easier for bodywork, because you can build 'in the air' without parts yet being properly connected, and it's much faster to iterate and see how the overall shape will look. Plus it costs you nothing to build with all parts in existence, and see in which colors parts are available. And in the end when you try to build it, you'll see where it needs more stabilization (also, that's something fairly easy to predict without actually building it if you already have experience with structures, and is less demanding than building a strong chassis or mechanisms).

It's definitely worth looking at others' builds, the bodywork is usually pretty visible just from pictures, without buying instructions..

[Paul B Technic]

You can only do / build the best that you can with the parts you have :)

 

[howitzer]

Building digitally is a two-edged sword, as mentioned here. It's really easy to make connections that are impossible to build in real life, but on the other hand, gyenesvi up there had a great argument for why digital building is good alternative to having a huge parts collection. You _can_ make solid and buildable stuff digitally, but it takes a lot of knowledge and care to design such builds. One notable difficulty in digital building is the fact that while any part is available in any colour digitally, many part/colour combinations aren't available in real life at all, or they may be really expensive/hard to acquire. So I'd recommend building only in white or something digitally and deciding the colour scheme only later, checking availability and price of each part, before making any purchases.

Either way, at some point you're faced with the need to get the parts to build the thing in real life, which can get expensive fast if you're building big stuff, even if the individual parts aren't that expensive. So I'd recommend starting with small and fairly simple stuff and move on to bigger builds once you have skills and wider part collection.