Math Wizard

@Mister Phes As I don't have much more time to participate I wanted to leave my feedback- I guess I'll do it here. I think the "first to" critic awards are a great idea to get people commenting! I might suggest starting the critic award for builders at the beginning of the contest, and starting the award for critics after a certain threshold like halfway through the contest, or once there are maybe 15 or 20 submissions. By the way, what is the status of the builder "first to" awards? We haven't heard much about them, just about the critic ones.

Honestly, I wish I had more old gray pieces rather than replacing them. I think it is good to have a bit of variety with rockwork, and you can't really mix lbg and dbg well, in my opinion. It was indeed modeled after the steps to Cirith Ungol from LotR- you can see more about this in a previous comment here: Glad you like the steps! As for the odd pieces, it was mostly due to a simple lack of pieces. I was running out of gray slopes, and these pieces were all decently large and more importantly, gray. If I had more "wacky" pieces I would. But for now its just the shark, brick separator, hat, cockpit, and large airplane bows

Nope, I'm stopping and claiming the prize for 50. I don't have the time to go all the way to 100. It's about 600 parts, so roughly 13% of the original

@Horation Just curious- what do you do for work? It seems like every time I get home from work and check on this you've been posting constantly throughout the day

That's kinda what I imagined when I suggested it to you. You surprised me with your solution. Also, @Mister Phes I think this was my 50th post!

Do you have a set scale planned? I know this usually helps guide me when doing micro models of sets. For example, converting every 8 studs width into 2 studs, or something like that.

Nice! I don't have any official LEGO stores within 3 or so hours of me, so I've never gotten to experience a PAB wall Maybe someday while traveling...

True, especially when you just win it, cause the price was $0! Though most of my sets from my childhood were just city sets that aren't worth much more now. Meanwhile my friends with Star Wars and Bionicle sets are able to resell theirs for a ton of money

This is what always happens to me! I start a microscale build, and it ends up way larger than I intend, despite being microscale. I think its because I just try to add to much detail. For example, in this build of the Lion Knights' Castle, it is really only like half or quarter scale, which isn't as small as I originally intended: https://www.flickr.com/photos/197227990@N07/53433612762/in/dateposted-public/

I think this looks a lot better, though I would just place Steve and another object on the two studs for the pictures, in order to hide the studs and make the whole raft appear continuous. I would also update the physical build accordingly, which will probably also mean another cover photo update as well.

I recall doing something similar, but I think we may have used Jenga blocks instead and sometimes green army men instead of LEGOs. The goal was always to destroy your opponent's build and kill all their troops in the least number of shots.

Oh, never mind then. I just didn't see the links beside the pictures, which is what mine displayed when I used Flickr links. No rush on trying to get something together, the deadline for the contest isn't for several weeks yet...

Yes! It sounds like you understand. I would draw a picture to help explain, but I can't figure out how to post pictures aside from imbedding flickr links, and I'm not going to draw a diagram of how to help you and post it to my flickr How do you post your images, since I think it is different than what I know how to do?

Interesting! I thought it was the old matrix dot continuous printer paper Either way, it should be pretty easy to edit out-- just a quick swipe with a healing brush or clone stamp, depending on the software.

The Star Wars figures are from my brother's collection, so just pieces we already have. Even castle figs are a bit pricey a lot of the time, so I make do with what I have. I don't really like to spend much money on LEGO, which is why I enter lots of contests- so I can win LEGO for free!

Perhaps I was unclear in how I explained it. I meant to essentially take what you have built in front of the build and mirror it and place it on top of the build, so that the top of the build appears to have a steady horizontal line, even if the bricks themselves don't.

Very true! While I am not the type of person that thinks digital building is evil and not real LEGO, I am definitely more likely to vote for a physical build any day. And besides, the cloth sail does look inherently better than the plastic one.

Sounds good! I often face this issue myself. At least you have some options that could work for other builds- I'm pretty sure I would only have enough in black or white. I would be interested to see what dark orange could look like though- It's close enough to stained wood I believe. (I don't know if I even have ANY dark orange pieces)

I must agree with @Horation on this one- It definitely adds more than it detracts! Also realized I missed a bit of a guessing game here with Steve's torso, as I haven't looked back at some of these older posts since before my trip. I also frequently choose minifigures based on their backs, as I don't have many from the medieval themes that I frequently build now. One of my favorite examples of this is this build: https://www.flickr.com/photos/197227990@N07/53109350152/in/dateposted-public/ I wish I took a picture of their fronts- quite hilarious; it was a mix of city and star wars, men and women, old and young!

I missed a whole conversation on shooting cannons- oh no! They used to be one of my favorites as child. Me and my brothers would build shooting ranges and fire our LEGO cannons at stacks of bricks and minifigs. Then we got a playmobile set that had a cannon and the wars really began! We still stuck to building with LEGO (don't worry, we didn't turn entirely to the dark side of playmobile), but it had great power for knocking LEGO towers apart. Now I just see cannons (and stud shooters) as a way to easily lose pieces, but they have a lot of nostalgia and are great for kids!

Maybe the 1x1 quarter tile would work. If you have the pieces remaining, you could just add a few in the gaps between offset slopes to create a consistent flow of the shoreline.

I suppose you could always just edit them out of the photo. Then again, if you didn't have time to add a nicer base, maybe you didn't have time to edit either, which is understandable. The nice thing is that you only really see the tile on the right side, the others are fairly hidden by the camera angle.

I think the tan walls probably work better than gray- Most pirate sets use a mix of white, tan, and yellow. My only qualm with the books is that the top one on the stack has a different colored cover than the back/spine, but I think outside of the piece used for LEGO books, this is a fine solution. In the past I haven't even used a bracket, so my books haven't even had spines and looked decent (in my opinion) Here's one of my MOCs that contained a bunch of brickbuilt books, as I don't have any actual ones: https://www.flickr.com/photos/197227990@N07/53635535342/in/dateposted-public/

I think the best advice is to choose how you're doing the figs first, and then scale the minibuild to that, and you'll avoid any problems with sizing. Considering he's only in two sets, I'd have to guess the 6286 Skulls Eye Schooner!

Gotcha! That makes sense. If you have any dark tan or dark brown now, that could complement it better than grey, but I suppose the grey does give it a more classic feel.