Grover

Yay! More story! I like how simple this vignette is, yet how many scenes it can produce. The interior is fairly clean, yet has some really nice detail to it. I also like the guy on top of the roof looking down on the whole scene below. Very nice, and I love the story! I'm really interested to see how it progresses.

Very cool idea with the orc town. It has a great feel, like it's an encampment that is slowly taking shape into something more permanent, but the orcs' method of building isn't as organized as some of the human settlements. The bones, tattered tarps, and the color choices are all great. The flat plains may be unrealistic in parts of mitgardia or avalonia, but I think they fit really well in the sandy wastelands. Great job!

Stunning! The level of detail is awesome. I love the creative use of the SW planets for domes, and think the color is really good with the tan, white, gold, and sand greens of the rest of the structure. I like the clean, smooth lines and the new feel to the whole thing. LOVE that fountain, too. I assume those are some fairly recent pieces. I need to look into some of those. I could go on and on about how awesome this is, but I will refrain except for saying that the Aslanic iconography is fantastic. Great job!

Is there a way that you can combine your art and your building, using Lego as a medium? I ask because some of the amazing builds you post are pieces of art. You have the eye not only to build, but also to put the time into photography and know what you're looking for. Your recent builds in the historic forum are great--the lighting on the lich (the most recent post that comes to mind) is awesome!

Thank you! High praise coming from you! Good point, too, on the layers that can be built in for the color chart. I don't have enough trans plates to do that yet, but maybe it gives me an idea for the next chart... I agree, too, the top is a bit barren. I should have done something else with it, but hopefully I'll figure that out as I revisit this in upcoming builds to see the seasons change and progress on the castle. Thank you!

Thanks! I enjoyed playing with the colors and was happy with how the water turned out. Thank you! I actually scaled it from a drawing to keep the proportions the same. I plan on adding to this build as the castle progresses. Thanks! Amusingly, the ship was the first thing I built, then scaled everything else around it. Finally got outside and took an overhead shot. You can see the dark blue ocean and deeper channel of the river, with the brown shallows from deposited mud as the river flows out to the sea. Hard to tell, but there's a 1 plate depression on the right hand side where the tide is receding for another wave (maybe easier to see in the album).

If sunlight (UV) eliminates the bloom, that suggests a thermal pathway for bloom. However, most sunlight imparts a great deal of thermal energy to a substrate (thus causing bloom), and the majority of polymers have trouble with UV light (degradation), suggesting to me that UV light probably doesn't help eliminate the yellowing. The picture doesn't show much of anything since it seems to be quite yellow to me. The best experiments to run would be to take three pieces that have bloomed, clean them both with retrobright, then put one in the freezer (also dark), one in the window with UV light, and one in the window inside a box (dark), and put the window pieces under the flow of a space heater. In this way, you could test the thermal vs. UV (as much as you can since UV imparts thermal energy as well) and try to probe the mechanism of bloom. Ideally, measuring the bloom quantitatively with something like an ATR-IR or a UV-Vis reflectance probe would be ideal, but those are not really household pieces of equipment.

Excellent! I love the brick built hull, and the rigging is fantastic. The colors, small crenellations, and the decorations on the underside of the battlements are awesome! Great job!

I'm really enjoying the story! The small vignettes are great. I like all the thin stairs in the last build, and the creative use of the portcullis sideways as bars. Great use of the sideways bricks as rockwork. I also like the creative use of the sideways arches for branches. I think I may have to use that in some of my future builds! My only suggestion would be to see about getting more light on your pictures. If you're using an SLR camera, upping the ISO may help. I'm still learning myself, but more light has helped me tremendously.

This is definitely my favorite dragon build of yours. I like the colors and the base, too. You could have gone with a dark red color, but I like your bolder choice of primary red. How long does it take you to build one of these from start to finish? Do you draw up plans first or do you freebuild?

Glad you like it! The rocks were one of those things that I had spent so much time looking at I couldn't decide if they actually looked good or I had finally just deluded myself. I'll try and get a pic up soon of the top down so you can see the shallows. Thanks! I'm glad the time on the cliffs worked out. It was kind of hard for me to tell there at the end. I agree, the tan top is kind of barren. I was thinking of putting down a bunch of 1x1 round plates over the dark tan beneath, but didn't have enough, so went with the large covering. It's the part of the build I'm least happy with. I tried a bit with the rock and the fall colors, but it didn't help a lot. Thanks a bunch! It's my first foray into micro, but was kind of fun. Thanks a bunch! I envisioned autumn on the Welsh coast to be quite overcast and gloomy. I agree, as I mentioned above to Basilicus, I'm not super happy with the tan, but I kind of ran out of other colors. I used the dark tan below for dry dirt, so couldn't reuse it. I probably should have made the tan, which is indeed supposed to be dry grass, more spotty, but a lack of plates for that kept me from doing so. I should probably order more of those on B&P. Also, I am an idiot. I misread the map, and Prenmôr is indeed in the northern part of the Enchanted forest. I'm going to edit the original post to reflect that in a second. I have the location on the map at the end of Book II, just near the mouth of the river. Once I get the HSS set, I'll mark it on the map for inclusion into the big map. Thanks for catching this!

What a great little build! While I second what soccerkid6 says about the various browns in the path, I think the snow and the trees really distract from the extra colors in the path. I like the small cabin, too--I have noticed that in the colder climates, many people build smaller because it's easier to heat a smaller structure, so this works, I think. Great job!

Very nice! I second what many of the others have said in that the red is a bold, and rather awesome choice for the inn, especially coupled with the red dragon heraldry on the shield. I like the dark tan roof, too, which I have personally find challenging to build, but you did a great job. I like the mix of olive and green foliage, and the flowers out front look good. I'm looking forward to the rest of the village! Does the inn have an interior? It looks spacious enough to have one and it could be really interesting!

Nice! I like the use of the ladders as a wrought iron fence. Looks great! The roof on the chapel looks good, too. I like the irregular aspect of the church on the baseplate as well. Make things feel more organic, I think. As suggestions, raising the green plates by a single plate to convey the idea that the grass is above the dirt path would help, and maybe breaking up the green grass with either a few varied color plates (olive, sand, or bright green), or maybe a few patches of browns/tans. Alternately, if you're going for a super-green Ireland like look, you might be able to throw in a few stones, a puddle, or maybe some light elevation changes to break things up. Overall, looks great though!

Ooh! This is going to be exciting! I found out buy reading some and taking some advice from Gideon, adding to your f-stop number and buming up the ISO on your camera can help get more light for your picture and brighten things up. Keep up the good work and story! I'm interested to see where it goes!

Yay for Nocturnus! Glad to see the story continue! I like the colors and the story, and the interior (although not visible without the extra pics) looks good, too. Out of curiosity, is this a new or old building in Nocturnus? You might be able to take a few more chunks out of the building, making it more crumbling from civil war damage or something, if you wanted to show off the interior, although if this is a new building, it may have stood the onslaught better and thus not as crumbling. Great job!

I'm really enjoying reading about Yngvi and Erick! This house is awesome, and exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from the snowy realms of Mitgardia. You have a good eye for the colors and the scene. I really wish Lego would come out with those awesome yellows that Altbricks has, but glad that you weren't afraid to use them. I think the birch trees really came out well, too. Love it!

Another freebuild to contribute to Avalonia, and to the story of Lady Gwenllian.

Gorgeous! I love the use of the red/dark orange stripes at the top, juxtaposed with the turquoise door. The idea is great, too--building up a town hall. The details of ornamentation without going overboard look great, and I like the clean lines. One suggestion, perhaps, is to clutter up the ground a bit with rubble; construction sites are rarely as clean as the site you show, and I find that boards, rocks, tools, etc. strewn about look rather realistic when looking at a construction site. Really nice job, keep up the good work!

Scouting a Site | Grover | Avalonia Early Spring in Prenmôr | Grover | Avalonia (technically, this was posted in Book II)

Not sure how I missed these two comments earlier! Just saw them updating the link in the opening post. Thanks! I'm glad you like the roof. I wish that they made the pieces in dark tan and a few other colors, as I think a multi-colored brown/tan/grey roof would look really interesting. Maybe even a few olive pieces, too, but such is life. For towns, some of the blues and reds might be interesting, too. Thanks! There's 3 or 4 different patterns you can use to make these roofs, and if you interleave them, you can make the roof look more irregular. In this case, I was aiming for making a 'new' looking roof, so I figured they wouldn't build the roof looking worn at the outset. I may try to make a more worn looking roof from this method later and we can all see how it goes. Glad you liked the firewood pile! Seems to be everyone's favorite and I'm seeing it show up in a lot of builds now! lol I tried to take some of your advice for my latest build (actually the predecessor to this in the story's chronology), although it's more of a flat build, so the lines aren't quite the same. I think it will be more obvious in future structure builds not at the microscale level. Adding to the f-number did help a lot, though, thanks!

The Tales of Lady Gwenllian 0. Introduction 1. The arrival of Lady Gwenllian aboard the Cedar Serpent 2. Scouting a Site Sailing from the northwest, Lady Gwenllian first sighted land on the coast of the Enchanted Forest of Avalonia. She and her small crew followed the coastline up the channel between the Enchanted Forest and DeVine Isle, stopping to resupply several times from villages, streams, and what resources as were available, all the while scouting potential sites for a new home. The horrible battles of her homeland's civil war taught her difficult lessons on fortifications, and she was determined to find the best possible site to build a castle. Ideally, she desired a site with a nearby quarry, accessible by land and by sea, on high ground, access to timber, and with ample farmland. After scouting several locations without luck, she and her entourage came across a rocky outcropping at the mouth of the Afondraig River on the northeastern coast of the Enchanted Forest. This flat, treeless area boasted steep rocky cliffs on two sides to deter attackers, and a narrow rocky strip along the shallows of the river that would make for a sheltered landing site. The rest of the high rocky area overlooked flat meadows that would be perfect for farms, and these ended about a mile away at the edge of a large forest. Anchoring the Cedar Serpent in the calm flow before the shallows near the mouth of the Afondraig River, Lady Gwenllian and her entourage offloaded supplies and set up a temporary camp. The fall colors were spotted about in the bushes that interspersed with the dried grasses, and made for a rather pretty scene. They could not be distracted by this beauty, however: after inquiring about local claims to the land, they would have to petition Queen Ylspeth for a charter to build, survey the land, and build temporary shelters for the winter. Over the winter, Lady Gwenllian and Seren, her Lady at Arms, would draw up the plans for the castle, whose construction was to begin in the spring. More pictures on Flickr.

Building historic MOCs sometimes requires landscapes including water. One of the popular trends is to use the trans-light blue tiles for water (probably due to large amounts included in the recent Ninjago sets) with varying color underneath to show depth. I love the technique of using tiles for water, but have never been a fan of the trans-light blue color except for ice and Caribbean-type waters. Thus, I began my search for color combinations that would best represent various types of water and/or ice. To this end, I prepared a chart of various 'natural' colors (greens, browns, and blues), then added white and black for comparison. Below is a copy of the chart I prepared by taking 4x4 plates (or an equivalent) and adding tiles of varying colors. Each of the setups is photographed with the same camera on the same day, with the same conditions. I thought I'd share this with anyone who was interested, particularly because it could help choose color combinations for projecting depth. I was a little surprised how little difference there is with some combinations, such as the dark blue, dark green, and black with the trans-green tiles. I personally like the idea of the trans-green tiles for ponds, swamps, and other less-flowing water, while I tend to like the trans-brown for oceans, rivers, and other moving bodies of water. The trans-clear looks good to me for ice and whitecaps in water. I hope that this will be useful for some of you as well.

Great detail! Love the floor and the use of printed pieces for the wall hangings and window. The photography is great, too! The closeups are a lot of fun, and the white spiderman web shooter for a bar rag is awesome! I am entertained by the story and am enjoying seeing where this family goes. :-)

Very nice! I love the interiors and how the whole house is hinged. I think you have captured a dwarven style very well. Great work!