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.

A towering special delivery

One of the best things about the LEGO fandom is how we can all build off of each other. (Inadvertent LEGO pun is inadvertent, but worth keeping.) This mighty tower by SweStar, for example, was inspired by the techniques developed by Luke Watkins Hutchinson. But there’s more to this build than just the underlying structure. Check out those great vines and those equally impressive spindly trees. Although there are minimal other landscape details, you can’t help but be pulled into the scene. What’s up with the approaching skeletal rider? Friend? Foe? Part-time USPS worker? It’s up to the viewer to decide.

If you’re looking for more cool towers, I suggest a quick stroll through our archives!

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A LEGO Master’s medieval masterpiece

Former Swedish LEGO Master Peter Ilmrud is known for detailed, colorful, and occasionally intricate works of art. Often times his builds feature subject matter of fantasy and bygone days. It’s hard to choose, but I think I enjoy his microscale castles best. This will be featured in a LEGO brand retail shop in Sweden, and it’s easy to see why.

The build catches the eye and takes you on an adventure from sea to castle spires. The real triumph is the parts usage in the castle itself. For the most part, the techniques aren’t new, but when they all come together the result is beautiful. I particularly like the techniques used on all the towers, especially stacking modified round plates and tiles back to back to achieve windows and the “stone” look. I also admire how the central helmet piece connected to the lantern element creates a particularly striking feature.

You can see more builds by Peter in our archives. While you’re at it, check out all the incredible previously featured builds in both the microscale and medieval categories.

He may be Gandalf the White, but he’s looking rather grey today

Tragically underused in LEGO builds is the immersive, cinematic shot. Sure, it’s vastly easier and faster to build a vignette, or a stand-alone building, but I deeply admire builders who can move their creation beyond plastic bricks and into an entire world filling the frame. Nathan Smith is one of those builders, playing with light and camera angles to put the viewer in the scene in a believable way. Are there many mind-blowing building techniques on display here? No, not really, though that door does look quite nice. But nothing is out of place, with meticulously arranged leaves and crates, and the smooth walls of the citadel allow the lighting effects to shine. And shine they do, illuminating a ruminating Gandalf perfectly.

Love LEGO builds inspired by The Lord of the Rings? Then check out the TBB LEGO Lord of the Rings archives. They’re epic!

Nature is reclaiming the palace, beautiful floor and all

It’s always fun to see what LEGO builders can come up with when encouraged to think of new ways to use particular pieces. And that’s exactly what Tom Loftus has done in this abandoned throne room with dark red 2×3 shields. The first place you’ll notice it is as the seat of the three thrones, which I really think works well.

I particularly like the overall design of the two smaller chairs – the seashell piece makes a very nice palmette on the seatback. The other place these shield parts are used on the floor, in a really genius kind of way. By arranging the front of the piece in a triangle, the handles on the back form a simple pattern. Repeat that 30 or so times and you have a really stunning looking floor. As a bonus, the spaces between the handles work really well for the overgrown motif, as they create the perfect gap for plant elements to be stuck into. A final note about the whole overgrown look: rather than just use clear bricks as windows and leave it at that, Tom covered the opposite side of the clear bricks with tree branches, blocking some of the light that would come through, just like vines on a real overgrown window.

An Orc-tastic Fishing Hideout

Sometimes, pillaging the land of righteousness just seems like too much work. So do what LEGO builder John Snyder does: put your feet up, cast in your line and relax.

There are a ton of little details that really make the build come alive. From the mossy vines growing all over the swamp to the different shades of brown used to look like wood rot, it’s all here. I especially like the use of pirate hook hands to hang the fish up. The roof tile work is equally exquisite.

My only gripe about this build is that I’m begging for more. It’s so good that I want to see the same thing spread out over dozens of baseplates. Congratulations on a job well done, John!

The play at Chapel Street

As I might have mentioned before, I am a sucker for using the old castle minifigures in creations using intriguing LEGO building techniques. Something about the mix of classic and modern just feels right to me. Atahlus latest build ticks all the boxes for me. Both buildings are filled with details. I love how the gothic building on the right is symmetrical for the most part, but some of the details are not. The offset between the woodwork and the yellow wall on the left is also quite nicely done. The base on which the houses are built is oddly shaped, which to me, always is a plus. Even the minifigures in the creation are not just there to fill the space; they tell a story (quite literally in this case).

Fishing in muddy waters

To me, LEGO builder Ralf Langer is known for his quite technical timbered buildings. This creation is no exception. We all know building a round structure with square LEGO bricks can be quite a challenge. As you can see a lot of the creation is round: the roof, the wooden staircase made of bars and tread links beside the tower, the bay window on the building on the right, the bridge between the two buildings, and that domed roof made with triangular road signs. Ralf almost makes it look easy. One of the best things about this creation is the usage of black sausages, round 1×1 plates with an open stud and brown 1×6 arches to create a round shape for the tower. Very clever! Another thing that deserves a mention is the use of the plant stem with 3 leaves to create the foliage for the trees. There are a lot of nice techniques and details to discover, but I’ll let you discover those yourself.

Follow the yellow brick...castle?

If you’ve been seeing a lot of yellow LEGO creations around here lately, that’s because Eli Willsea has been engaged in a competition with Jonas Kramm to see who can put the yellow 9V train track switch to use best. This striking microscale castle is one of my favorites from Eli, in part because everything in the picture is brick-built, except the blue sky. There’s some great forced perspective among the tiny jagged mountains in the distance, the castle in the middle, and the cave in the foreground, but the best detail for me is the parapet over the castle gate, which is made with yellow lever bases attached to the bottom of an upside-down 1×4 plate.

Unique castle details leave nothing wanting

Move over, 1980’s LEGO yellow castle. There’s a new fortress in town: Jako of Nerogue has become my new favorite castle constructor.

At first glance, the thing that jumps out at me most is the curvature of the gate. That’s not something you usually see on medieval fortifications. It’s almost like a Moorish-Spain look. From the gate, my eyes are drawn to the teeny-tiny details of the walls and windows, with LEGO bricks having the exact appearance of stone. I really like the style Jako chose to use on the gate columns and the main keep windows.

Does anyone know how he did that? Just incredible! This is how I want all my castles to look like.

The medieval market village gets a fresh new look

If you’ve been a LEGO fan throughout childhood, this situation might be familiar to you: spending hours staring at a set you’ve always wanted in the catalog, obsessing over it until you’d memorized every detail in that set, down to every last brick. For me, that set was the 10193 Medieval Market Village, with the hinge-open village houses and waterwheel powered blacksmith hammer. It was a beauty back then and it still does in this recent Medieval Market Village redux by Robert Maier, aka hellboy.bricks. Drawing inspiration from all the original set’s essential features, this revamp uses more complex techniques yet still holds all the character and charm of the original Medieval Market. The brick-built tree branches have been substituted with Technic connectors, a pumpkin patch has been added in the back, and macaroni tiles now adorn the blacksmith shop’s archways. The classic brick slope roofing on both buildings has also been swapped out with a cheese slope roof for the blacksmith shop and a curved tile roof for the medium blue house. Also, the olive green looks gorgeous on the newly paved cobblestone, a color that you wouldn’t have found in this 2009 set.

Missing the good ol’ days of the Castle theme? Robert has made another set redux (hint: there’s goats) that you can check out here.

In the early mourning light

LEGO builder Sheo. has one of the broadest ranging skillsets out there, having drafted masterful models of everything from futuristic motorcycles to uncannily accurate DLSR cameras. Now they’re back with a bizarre shrine called the Temple of Tears. This eery holy place is dominated by two giant weeping angles chiseled in low relief.

There are a few small vignettes to accompany the main temple, though Sheo is keeping their cards close regarding the mystic meaning behind it all. But that doesn’t stop me from appreciating the build, which is filled with intricate details, from the wavy blue leading lines on the floor (or the floor itself which is covered in a zig-zag pattern of tiles), to the teardrops falling from the giant eye, all the way to the intersecting columns supporting the arched roof. Sheo has provided a video that walks the viewer through all the various elements.

Is Unikitty a Disney Princess?

Sure, you might recognize this build by Koen Zwanenburg as a mini version of the Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland Paris. But if you imprinted on The LEGO Movie like I did, this looks like Unikitty bought and redecorated Cinderella’s castle. And that’s not a bad thing. (Well, maybe for Cinderella.) Built on a 32 x 32 baseplate, Koen has crammed an enormous amount of detail and creativity into a compact footprint. There are little rewards all over for taking a close look, like spotting a Gungan shield as decoration, or recognizing bunches of golden ski poles as turret toppers.

There are even more building Easter eggs on rear of the castle. Can you spot the hot dogs and unprinted minifigure heads?

All in all, it’s a masterful effort, and an impressive display piece. But we’ve come to expect that level of “wow” from Koen, as a trip into our archives will show.

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