Lego Challenge #20: Build a castle
My castle
I started off by trying a couple ways to make a latticed gate. I settled on a design using plates, jumpers and long tiles. The edges were ugly, so I knew I would need to hide them behind the wall.
Front facade of my castle, complete with latticed grate and drawbridge.
Next came the challenge of creating a convincing archway. I inventoried the upside-down slopes in the Architecture set, and quickly determined that I didn’t have what I needed. After some experimenting, i built the arch upside-down as I had more normal slopes, and used clever SNOT construction to install the arch upside-down.
Top removed to show SNOT Technique to build archway as I don’t have those angled pieces in upside-down versions.
The arch had a couple of attachment points for the lattice, so I used the other side of the brick to attach some nice lanterns.
Detail of lattice and torches
The rest of the build went quickly, adding the wings to the castle, turrets and drawbridge with relative ease. I did use a little offset work, otherwise pretty straightforward construction.
Torch detail
-
- Angle View
-
- Detail of lattice and torches
-
- As usual, the back of the model is an ugly mess.
-
- Drawbridge landing
Conclusion
Trying to build a couple of the details including the archway and lattice gate presented technical challenges, and building the castle around that was a lot of fun. The other conclusion is that I need a lot more basic 1x bricks to build bigger models.
I used a couple pieces outside of the normal set: Hinges, 2×2 Jumpers, and a lot of extra tiles which I recently purchased.
project time: 1 hour, mostly in figuring out the lattice and arch.
TOM ALPHIN builds