A blessing in the old chapel at Marbury Village

As we start wrapping up our coverage of the various LEGO Castle creations that were part of the Ye Old Merry Battleground collaboration by “InnovaLug” at Brickfair VA, we would be remiss in our duties if we failed to highlight this beautiful village by TBB alum Mark Erickson. Mark’s village includes two half-timbered houses and an excellent church in unconventional tan (sandstone, I presume). The church has sculptures in the same color as the structure — though in fact these would likely have been painted garishly when carved originally in the Medieval era — as well as a graveyard and a red roof with some subtle texturing.

Marbury Village

Mark’s extra pieces of rounded landscaping that sort of “drip” off of his main diorama illustrate the interesting approach that the InnovaLug team took to their collaborative display. Rather than integrating the various contributions on a single underlying brick-built landscape (as we did with our Battle of Bricksburg display), the team used white space between the builds to highlight each build separately. We tried this approach with TBB’s “ChronoCon” display at BrickCon a couple of years ago, and it’s not generally a style of collaborative display that I think works all that well — though InnovaLug seems to have pulled it off quite well by spanning the open space with little details like the smaller landscaping pieces here. What do you think of this display style?

Ye Old Merry Battleground BrickFair VA 2016

5 comments on “A blessing in the old chapel at Marbury Village

  1. Mnemonyx

    It’s an excellent way to do a collaborative display – it allows credit to be given to individual builders, avoids both the ‘grid line square’ effect and obvious ‘fill in’ sections, and it allows viewers to appreciate individual models better – without be cluttered by adjacent models or simply lost in a sea of studs!

  2. bruce n h

    It certainly works well here. I see advantages and disadvantages to this type of display:

    Advantages:
    -More time and effort spent on the individual MOCs rather than lots of connecting landscaping
    -Display highlights the MOCs, easier to point to who did what etc.
    -As noted, it lets you lay things out at more realistic/organic non-square angles
    -Biggest advantage is that it is significantly easier to organize MOCs into a group display. No need to pre-arrange what goes where, if someone doesn’t show up there is no obvious gap, etc.

    Disadvantage
    -The flip side of highlighting the individual MOCs is that it can appear less as a collaborative display than as a bunch of people who happened to put their MOCs on the same table. I do think the little landscaping bits helps mitigate this.
    -Hard to place figs into some sort of collaboration wide battle or other action sequence.

    One thought on increasing the illusion of connection in a disconnected collaboration would be to have many (though not necessarily all) of the individual MOCs contain pieces of a road, kind of like this one: https://www.flickr.com/photos/66620538@N04/27879938691/
    with a consistent style/width for the road, then arrange the pieces with road such that you could imagine a continuous road winding through the MOCs. You could also have little bits of connecting scenes, like the small bits of landscaping in this InnovaLUG display, that had pieces of the road, or just have wagons, travelers, etc on the road just placed directly on the tablecloth in the imaginary roadway between the MOCs.

  3. bruce n h

    Similarly you could have bits of river in the individual MOCs and arrange them accordingly. If you did this you could get a few PAB cups worth of trans-blue 1×1 round plates and scatter them between the “river bits” of the various contributions.

    Sorry for the double-post.

  4. soccerkid6

    @Bruce N H: We did have consistent roads/paths with dark tan as the color used for the dirt, and bley tiles and small plates for stones, though given the space between modules at some points, that wasn’t overly obvious. Matthew Kay suggested having the roads be much more connected to really tie everything together cohesively, and I think that would be a good compromise of the flexibility allowed through using irregular bases, and also tying things into one display.

    We also tried a river section, somewhat similar to what you described, but having all the water be loose studs and just using sections of river bank to define its path. You can see the full layout on InnovaLUG: https://innovalug.com/post/68/ye-old-merry-battleground-collaboration-at-brickfair-va-2016

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