jimmynick

And you did it well

That black storefront is delightful, and I love that you've included various antiques downstairs. Great build!

Hello dahlings, Officer Lewis here. I'm the best glorified mall cop in the entire CTU. Thinking about upgrading my segway for a hoverboard.

Wow, this is amazing. The crystal chamber is so simple yet so lovely, and the entire model is photographed beautifully.

It's a bit of an awful piece of pottery, but you've captured its likeness well and even made it a little bit more friendly in appearance. Congratulations on the gong in the contest.

Eagerly awaiting the game; glad we have full sign-ups!

This is quite a nice scene. I know you ask for criticism, so I shall offer that the patch of ground on which the camels stand is a bit blocky around the edges - perhaps include some of those wing-type plates you included next to the building. The shed itself is nicely built and I appreciate the brick-built door. Nice work.

That vintage car is really something. I like the Citroën DS, too. Thanks for sharing, @Minoton.

I saw A Star is Born last night with a few old schoolmates. Far darker than I expected, but Lady Gaga was great.

What a great build you've got here - I'm amazed the different levels are held together just by bricks and plate with no fancy skeleton inside. All the scenes you've built into it are just lovely - the hangar in particular is wonderful. Three years in the making, I'm sure you need a rest now.

@Rustinidiel, you've really achieved your objective. It's immediately recognizable as Darth Maul's ship, but in the lovely TIE package. The ion engine on the back of the cockpit pod is simple yet effective. Nice job!

1) Yes, but it's been a while. 2) I'll be out of town, incommunicado, from about Friday until Jan 1st but otherwise I'm fine - if that's an issue, then just leave me out. 3) I think so I think so

mmmmm, it's been a while since I've been to a Five Guys.

Bingo. Best Theme: Harry Potter has been solid all year through Best Minifigure/Figure: I've been really impressed by the CMF Dumbledore Best Set: 31083 Cruising Adventures is perfect on price per piece and is a very solid model in itself Worst Theme: Unikitty, I think Worst Minifigure/Figure: IG-88, because putting all that printing on the 1x1 cylinder makes the droid's head way too tall. I don't think TLG has ever done a good IG-88 Worst Set: I'm stuck between the First Order AT-ST (actually only half of an AT-ST) and the AT Hauler (WTF is that) Most Anticipated for 2019: Not gonna lie I'm super stoked for the 40349 Valentine's Puppy Brickheadz

@FTG Prime, that modification perfects it. Well done!

It would indeed be great for the anniversary, but the bottom wouldn't drop out of the market.... Surely if they re-released the CC Boba Fett, his legs and torso would be lt bley, not lt grey?

Just like everyone else has said: it's very cute but also a very effective and compact design, much better than what TLG produces. Is there any way to lower the very tip of the nose, though?

I hadn't been following this game at all, but when I saw the post on the front page, I thought "that looks like Nar Shaddaa." I'd like to thank @MstrOfPppts for the verisimilitude, and to congratulate all the other faction leaders on their excellent builds.

I love how you livened up those horizontal gray stripes by inserting grille tiles higher up. Has a very contemporary feel and seems architecturally realistic. Nice job.

The flight deck of the Clemenceau is thick enough to use a SNOT technique to replace the yellow stripes with the sides of yellow tiles. The trick then would be to set the runway at an angle, but I think it would be worth a shot. All your ships are quite lovely - in particular I enjoy your Krivak III frigate.

Still you conflate advanced technique with good art in order to rationalize your biases. Let's look at some examples in the art world to challenge your biases: Tracy Emin is an English artist who eschews oil painting, etc. in order to focus on abstract art. She is highly trained, but I suspect you would denigrate her work as "crap"; El Greco and Goya are fairly old artists who set themselves apart from the art world of their times with unique stylistic choices; Thomas Kinkade is an American artist who has become something of a meme because his paintings are highly detailed and painted with good technique, but his work is not considered "real art" because he commercialized it; Bob Ross didn't commercialize his work, but he did have a TV show in which he showed various painting techniques. You cannot deny that he has decent technique, but he is, like Thomas Kinkade, "not a serious artist". Outside the world of art: Frank Lloyd Wright was not a formally trained architect, but he was very influential in that field and is one of America's favourite architects; Mozart wrote high-quality music when he was literally a child. What can we say objectively about Leonardo's work? We can agree that he mastered the techniques of sfumato, perspective, and others, so he was a very skilled painter. We can agree that his techniques were influential on other artists, and here we can objectively say this is where Leonardo obtains some of his value. But we cannot say that La Gioconda is good artwork simply because you like it, just like we can't say Emin's My Bed is bad artwork simply because you don't like it. As a side note, how do you feel about David Hockney (formally educated) and Francis Bacon (self-taught)?

This is just taking a subjective value judgment and pretending it is objective. Just like when you dismiss Wonders of Peru as the effort of a cabal of trolls, simply because you don't like it.

You are the one putting these chauvinist statements into other people's mouths. Naive art has nothing to do with race, ethnicity or nationality (or even skill), but instead reflects a lack of formal artistic education. Fortunately for the skeptics, people do like naive art include "real" artists like Gauguin, so one can't really say that naive art is artistically bankrupt. Folk art, on the other hand, is very much tied to place but still has little to do with artistic skill. The issue here is that while those lovely Peruvian murals you've posted are indeed art (which is not to say these tableaux are not), they are not so uniquely tied to Peru as the ayacuchano concept behind the Wonders project. You say Zwarte Piet is real folklore: This deliberately contrasts him with the other Belgian tradition in the same post, which you think is "crap". By extension, it seems that any art form you don't like cannot possible be real art, or real folklore. This is an interesting pair of statements. What does intrinsic value mean? Let's take a look at the efforts of a Renaissance master. Take Leonardo's Mona Lisa. I could facetiously put it to you that the only intrinsic value of that painting is that I can burn it in a fireplace for warmth on a cold winter's night. People do value that painting, partly because it was stolen a few times around the turn of the 20th century. But let's look at another example. Consider the Last Supper, the fresco painted on the wall of a dining room in a monastery in Milan. Is it technically sound? No - Leonardo's pigment kept falling off the wall because he tried to tinker with the recipe for fresco-making, and it's an unmitigated disaster that required much restoration. What is the point of the fresco? It relates a Biblical story and connects the monks eating in that room with the story of Christ. The picture is an accessory to the connection of 16th-century Italy with Jesus. Nevertheless, the Last Supper is a masterpiece in the Western artistic canon. Unfortunately, I can't take it down from the wall and burn it. The point is this: the message, the story, and the intention of the artist have been the backbone of art for millennia. The story of ayacuchano is just as valid as any in the art world. It's time to get over yourself.

One might say there's no technical merit to the Minecraft sets, but the Idea was popular and it passed review. Not only that, but there's an entire line of Minecraft sets, so clearly technical merit has little to do with the success of a project. No, it's because you are so generally dismissing the artistic efforts of an entire country based on one example, which is unfair to the entire country. To name one example: if I don't like "Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp, does that mean that the ouvre of French art is worthless? If I don't enjoy the taste of Chimay, does that mean Belgium has no real culture? Of course not. Consider your example of garden gnomes; they are incredibly kitsch, but the kitsch comes with a certain warm or loving feeling. In fact, I think a sculpted garden gnome in LEGO might be fairly amusing, even though I would not put one outside my house. That aside, folk art is not all bad, but it is not all good either. I don't like bluegrass, haggis, or Morris dancing, but if ten thousand users on Ideas support one of those things, then it would deserve a fair shake. Just like Wonders of Peru. Who are you to say that Zwarte Piet is true folklore and these tableaux from Peru are not? Maybe it's the eurocentrism talking.... You are trashing the very idea of the project based purely on your own assumptions and biases. See below: You have no evidence for this claim. Going to google with the words "ayacuchano" or "retablo" indicates that this is actually folkloric tradition going back 500 years, and not just tourist tat. I quite like the Wonders of Peru based on aesthetic considerations. Does that make me wrong? I don't suppose anyone is going to convince you, founder of a thread dedicated to slating submissions from children and projects that are purportedly low-effort, that you are anything but the mightiest arbiter of taste.