This landscape is an homage to my grandmother, as I’ve always seen her surrounded by nature, living in a house between two mountains with a large garden and forests. As you can imagine, this moc has a special place in my heart.

The idea for this moc came, as usual, from wandering on Pinterest to seek inspiration. Pinterest is packed with fantastic arts of all kinds, making it really easy to gather inspiration, even if AI art is spreading there like crazy nowadays. One day, I came across a series of pixelated microscale landscapes such as valleys with villages, hills and fields that caught my attention. At first I thought it was yet another AI image, but I was informed it came from a human  – Franek pixel art. The person behind it even made a game, so beautiful.

Every time I hike or just wander in mountains, plains, or forests, I’m always getting inspired by nature like this. Just the sound of birds singing repairs the soul. Seeing a waterfall, a nice path through trees or a rock partially covered with green moss, it just makes me want to build something – that’s why I love doing terraforming. Unfortunately, these are the hardest to recreate for various practical reasons such as space, parts, or even time. Yet, on microscale though, those issues are kind of solved because those landscapes can be represented without having to turn a living room into a modelling convention.

The building process went relatively smoothly, as it’s just basic terrain. It only took a lot of time and pretty much my whole collection of sand green (Yeah I had to use really weird parts to stretch it this far). If I had been able to focus on just this MOC, it probably wouldn’t have taken so long, but it’s more the project that got spread over several weeks – which is usually not the case- but you know… Vignweek and Frogust happened.

As large as this moc is, it’s not my most complex work, but I’ll talk about a few techniques. First, the turtle egg part, aka the printed 1×1 plate with a black square, is commonly used by the community to represent doors and windows in houses. It works so well and is too good not to be utilized.

In the inspiration picture, a few fences can be seen. I thought it added nice variations to the groups of houses, and the modified plate felt like the best choice for it.

The lack of light bluish gray wedge made me use those big circular wedges, and you know what they say: “Creativity comes with restrictions” and it seems like a nice proof of that as it’s adding a lot of visual interest in my opinion.

In order to get all these variations of level, I massively used a technique I love and use all the time: the snot brick with a bracket. Basically, you’re using technic brick/snot bricks combined with brackets to get a 1/2 plate height difference. This offset is very versatile and can add a lot of details for loads of styles of mocs.

At last, and I’m not reinventing the wheel here, the famous technique of the cone to represent tiny trees, simple yet so efficient.

Building this landscape has been so fun, even though it took longer than expected. I’ll definitely build a few mocs in this style because there’s a lot more pixel art in the style that sent me down this path, and, you know, nothing can surpass a quiet country valley if you are seeking comfort.