A good day from the Netherlands (and already asking for advice)

[Arcturus24]

Hello wonderful LEGO people,

I'm a 20-year old student from the Netherlands and have been playing with LEGO for as long as I can remember. However, as I grew older, my interest grew less and less and the people I used to play and build with stopped doing so. The love still remained, and I still can't walk by a toy store without scanning for LEGO.

However, when I moved into my own appartment, I took my collection with me (now also bolstered by one of my parent's old collections), and the spark of ignited again (somewhat). Lately, I've seen pictures of the Star Destroyer Tyrant, which sparked my inspiration like mad. The desire to pool my entire collection into one big build surfaced again, and I'm trying to get ideas for a space ship to build. However, looking at my OC's, I realized that I'm not a good enough builder to pull something off even remotely close (my latest cruiser fresh in mind, where I ran out of hull parts and inspiration half-way...).

What I'm asking for mostly is advice on how to go forward. I really want to become a better builder, but seeing the progress I made over my youth doesn't bode well for any progress if I just keep stumbling on. What can I do to improve? Are there good articles to read? Video's to watch? Building exercises to do? Builds to study and draw inspiration from? (And is this even the right place to ask?)

A note on my collection might also be appropriate: I've mostly collected medieval/fantasy themes and space/science-fiction themes, but also have a healthy amount of standard building bricks.

Thank you for bearing through my ramblings and any advice you might be able to give!

Arcturus24

[Zerobricks]

Did you buy any recently relased sets? You can study techniques used by Lego and build upon them. Or simply download isntructions and build the models in LDD to learn. And Just keep on trying different things and as with all others skills, the more you do it the better you get.

[gotoAndLego]

My suggestion is to buy several of a ship and try combine them into a single larger one using the techniques from that set.

[Arcturus24]

Thank you both for your responses!

@zblj: I have quite a few recent sets, the most recent are probably Malevolence from Star Wars (9515) and Attack of the Wargs (79002) from The Hobbit. I will try your suggestions for sure!

@gotoAndLego: whereas I do find the idea epic, I don't really have the money to buy multiple big ships... and one of the aims of my project is to combine most of what I have into one big build, and this would beat that point.

[BrickCurve]

Thank you both for your responses!

@zblj: I have quite a few recent sets, the most recent are probably Malevolence from Star Wars (9515) and Attack of the Wargs (79002) from The Hobbit. I will try your suggestions for sure!

@gotoAndLego: whereas I do find the idea epic, I don't really have the money to buy multiple big ships... and one of the aims of my project is to combine most of what I have into one big build, and this would beat that point.

Well I think starting with a large model is a mistake, your skills will grow more if you start with smaller MOCs and gradually increase the size. I have the parts to make a huge castle/ space ship, but I don't have enough to make it nearly as detailed as my smaller models. In the end you will be better off building smaller, high quality MOCs rather than big, not very detailed ones.

Edit: With a collection of over 120 000 parts, I can't really build large, detailed models larger than this-

Anyway, I hope this helps.

Edited May 1, 2016 by BrickCurve

[ItsaGoodyear]

Hello :D WELCOME TO EUROBRICKS! :D

[Captain Braunsfeld]

Welcome to Eurobricks.

I can recommend to search for books on Lego building and to dive into the depths of this forum.

You will find a lot of inspiration!

[Arcturus24]

Thanks a lot again for all the tips! I'll start by doing some smaller builds and then doing bigger and bigger ones, as BrickCurve suggested. But for the moment, I'm mostly busy sorting what I have.

I was, however, having a dilemma: should I break down my current builds (mostly models with some MOC's) for parts, or should I leave them be? Is the loss of models on a shelf worth the gain of parts?