Tag Archives: Castle

Dragons! Knights in shining armor! Trebuchets & ballistas! From enormous LEGO castles buttoned up for battle to peaceful village market scenes, we’ve got your LEGO Castle needs covered right here.

Build castle classic again.

Many older fans of LEGO might long for the days of yore, before we had fancy things like minifigures and molded animals. Grant Masters liked those good old days when we had to build our own horses. After all, the first LEGO horse wasn’t introduced until 1984, years after the first castle sets with brick-built horses. With his latest creation, Grant took it a step further and built his own people too!

Crusaders

The use of some pretty basic elements give his Crusaders a sturdily armoured look. And though he’s rejected newfangled molds for people and animals, he’s adeptly sculpted a horse with the use of new elements, such as the curved slopes, quarter round tiles, and my current favouite use of the power blast piece, giving the horse’s head just the right shape.

Twas the night before Halloween

Builder architectlego has amazing skills in creating ethereal LEGO scenes with great photography, lighting and photo magic touchups. This Halloween themed build is one more that does not disappoint.

Halloween around the corner… elixirs brewed in advance for peak potency,
Luring the young and innocent.. with all things sweet and savory,
Isn’t it obvious? …stay away outsiders,
Dead giveaway! …cracked windows and spiders,
Complete in costume with a crooked pointy hat,
No witchery wicked ways are complete without the companion cat.

Me: I’m totally gonna rock this campaign! Also me: Rolls a 1

I am intrigued by tabletop gaming, but nobody invites me to their game nights as I have a reputation for rolling up my sleeves, grabbing the D20, then diving right in and ruining the entire campaign for everyone. But that doesn’t stop me from being fascinated by these brick-built Ram Rider miniatures, though. With a name like War Scape, it’s safe to assume this builder knows a thing or two about board games. Built around LEGO cows and featuring a few custom bits and four Tauntaun horns each, he tells us these nimble goats are the perfect light cavalry to carry their dwarven riders into battle along mountaintops and northern crags.

Dwarf Faction Regular Unit: Ram Riders of Clan Stonehorn

With my luck, I would find a way to have my character fall off the mountain and land right into enemy doo-doo. Still these would look amazing on any battle game board. Next game night, be sure to grab a few friends because there is nothing more depressing and humiliating than when your mom walks in on your one-handed solo campaign.

Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the bricks of an Englishman!

I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head when I saw this cut-scene of a large bearded brick monster having a go at the castle themed minifigures fighting for their lives. Gotta hand it to Paddy Bricksplitter not just for the overall action-filled scene, but my favourite is the weaponry — the catapult built with a bent hose for its bow arm. The details of the still-protruding shaft sticking out of the giant’s arm while bleeding is simply ingenious and well thought out.

Big Trouble

No tree huggers in these woods

If you are preparing your castle for a siege, you need to stock up on lumber, not just to keep out the cold, but to deprive your enemies of building material for siege engines. You could do this with manual labor, but why bother with that when you have a wizard who can bring the ultimate lumberjack to life? In this case, the wizard is Anthony Wilson who has built a mighty golem he calls the Tree Feller. And judging from the sparsely wooded scene, he has been earning his moniker. Anthony’s model is a perfect blend of castle building techniques and constraction figure sculpting. I especially like the arrowslit/visor, and the patches of moss throughout the towering hulk. Of further note is the great use of partial minifigs wading through the swamp water.

Oeric, Tree Feller

Craft me a hammer, sword, or a horseshoe or two

Growing up in the 1990s, one of the things that made LEGO castle sets so appealing was the way in which they were advertised; catalog images were perfect at world-building, with sets placed within carefully crafted, colorful environments. Robbadopdop‘s blacksmith shop evokes those fond memories, and his attention to detail would have impressed my 8-year-old self ten times over. There’s plenty of clever parts usage to appreciate here, including a minifigure ruff for flower petals, hair representing the end of a mop, and disposable sprues from plants with 3 large leaves for green vines winding up the side of the building. The building itself employs an excellent use of color and utilizes a diverse range of parts, which helps it feel both gritty and fun to look at.

Blacksmith's Workshop

One of the coolest details is the way the roof flexes, complete with staggered shingles. If you’re wondering how this detail was achieved, Robbadopdop has shared pictures of the internal structure. He used rigid tubing, which can be easily cut to size and is flexible enough to shape, and the roofing was then draped into place. The end result is fantastic.

Blacksmith's Workshop - Roof WIP

You are not prepared! (for this LEGO Illidan Stormrage from World of Warcraft)

A cornerstone of gaming, the role-playing online game World of Warcraft, has recently had a resurgence. The re-release of its original form (before seven expansions) has had millions hooked, me including. I guess that explains my lack of activity in the LEGO world… But while everybody else is busy killing boars and growing out their hair, Chi Hsin Wei has been building. The result is Illidan Stormrage, one of the central characters in the Warcraft storyline.

Illidan Stormrage

The character is obviously instantly recognizable, with the torn wings, green demonic tattoos and his weapons, the warglaives of Azzinoth built using lime green dragon wings. The muscles of the upper body are quite impressive, as is the construction of the character’s pants that look like they have not been changed for ten thousand years…

A glorious day down on the farm

LEGO Castle is a building style dominated, perhaps understandably, by LEGO castles. It’s good to see the less militaristic side of medieval life depicted in the bricks — particularly when it’s as well done as this Manor House and farm scene by Peter Ilmrud. The main building is excellent — stone walls evoked with lots of texture, a nicely-built thatched roof, and the typical “Mock Tudor” woodwork enlivened with sand green window frames. The surrounding farm is wonderfully detailed with a field of corn, a carrot and pumpkin patch, a paddock for the horses, and a filthy-looking pig sty.

LEGO Castle Manor House

A lower-angle image gives a nice close-up view of some of the finer details, including the attention paid to the different types of paving and path, the tiled roof of the outbuilding, and those wonderful crops…

LEGO Castle medieval farm

A stately castle fit for a pocket-sized king

This tiny castle by prolific LEGO microscale builder Jeff Friesen has all it takes to make a towering appearance. As the builder notes, this is not a castle built for defense. This is a regal structure built to show wealth and power, or perhaps serve as the central focus for a theme park.

We’ve featured Jeff’s incredible work in the past and this model is quite different from his usual fanciful style. He trades in whimsical landscapes and modern cities for a more uncomplicated look. Clean, straight lines are the order of the day in this kingdom. But straight lines need not be boring! There is just enough asymmetry here to keep it architecturally interesting without straying into high fantasy territory. The subdued color palette works nicely, especially when offset by the small pops of color from the brown trees and red flag. The shield with crown decoration is a nice finishing touch that draws the eye to the entrance and lets the viewer know exactly who presides over this Lilliputian domain.

The original chicken walker

Long before Chicken Walkers (a.k.a. AT-STs) wobbled about on snowy plains and through thick forests in a galaxy far, far away, another walker with chicken legs wobbled about through the thick forests of Eastern Europe. That walker is the house of Baba Yaga. Despite the ambiguous intentions of that misshapen old woman, if I were wandering about lost I think I would prefer to meet some stormtroopers rather than her. Jessica Farrell brings us the hut of the notorious hag, complete with the pestle-wielding witch herself clad in black robes and a large cauldron that perhaps contains the stewed remains of some unwary traveler.

Home of the Baba Yaga

The house has some nice shaping to the walls and roof, along with a convincing wooden texture. The trees of the forest are also nice, with good use of parts to make for lovely bark. The Ninjago ghost swords make for surprisingly good plants, which complement the rest of the foliage beautifully. I especially like the tires stacked up to form the chicken-leg pattern on the house supports. So, who wants to go walking the woods of Eastern Europe? Not I, not with a woman like this lurking about.

Enormous LEGO castle dominates the shoreline

If a medieval castle was an exercise in the projection of power, we’ve got a new Lord of the Manor on the scene in Joel Midgley. His latest LEGO project is Hingston Castle, a formidable fortress, impressive in both scale and details. The sheer size of the castle grabs the initial attention, but then you’re sucked in by the little touches — the lovely shoreline landscaping, the water, the roughness of the walls, the off-grid angles of the outer rampart. And as for that dark grey line tracing the contours of the crenellations — beautiful!

LEGO Castle

Joel has lavished as much attention to detail on the action within the walls as without. The central yard plays host to grazing animals, trees and flowers, patrolling guards, and stables…

LEGO Castle stables

Best of all, hinged panels in those walls allow visibility of the castle’s fully-detailed interior. Click to take a tour of this incredible LEGO castle…

Precise, clean cuts. No one saw anything. Again.

The world of Magic: the Gathering is, despite its cheap fantasy storyline, a treasure trove of characters and other motives. Some (far too few, if you ask me!) LEGO builders like Eero Okkonen take inspiration from it and create amazing works of art. This recreation of The Wanderer is a great example of a builder capturing the original artwork perfectly. The Wanderer is a clichéd mysterious character in the lore that would be quite interesting if it was in any other story.

The Wanderer

The build is mostly what one would expect from this master character builder. The real highlight is the incredible accuracy to the source material. The exotic colours like pink, gold and sand green are not the easiest to work with in LEGO, but Eero stretched his collection to the limit and successfully recreated the character, with all her challenges. The most interesting part usage to me was the Technic figure scuba flipper used as the ends of the hair. To read more about the building process, check out Eero’s own blog post on Cyclopic bricks.