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.

An Assassin’s Creed

One of the things I enjoy about the LEGO community is seeing how certain people grow as builders. NS Brick Designs has created some fantastic models, but I loved looking at the comparison of his most recent Assassin’s Creed creation to the original built three years ago. His attention to detail has really come a long way.

The Assassin’s Creed game franchise is known for its wide ranging locations and times in history. While this scene isn’t based on one particular game, it captures the spirit of the series perfectly with one of the titular assassins on top of the building ready to leap down and take out the enemy. Various techniques are used here to create a wonderful look. The use of the gears and mechanical arms as decor give great detail to the building along with upside down ice cream cones and Battle Droid legs to create a nice treatment over the windows. The tree made from the 3 leaf pieces and in particular the bird made from a plume, minifigure hands and the base of a lever really caught my eye. I also like the use of the sideways profile bricks that make up the paved ground and the connected clips that lend a nice look to the stairway railing.

There is a lot to appreciate in this LEGO model, so be sure to take the time to take a closer look and be inspired.

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The Black Breath

If you are like me, you’re probably thinking the world could use more LEGO creations inspired by The Lord of the Rings. Am I right? Who is with me on this? As it turns out, Cole Blood (who, in my opinion, has the coolest name in the history of the world) has answered all our prayers with this stunning piece he calls “First Appearance of the Ringwraiths”. Having no physical form, the wraiths are cleverly depicted as hellish black apparitions that seem to seep into the landscape. The orc heads on pikes, the toadstools, and the small flowing stream create excellent visual cues throughout. Stay tuned, because this is merely one piece of a larger Second Age collaborative series we’ve been covering that Cole is participating in with his equally talented friends. I will eagerly wait, right after heading over to the registry to change my name to Rex Awesome or something.

This magical workshop holds a secret

Builder Brick Ninja brings us a terrific homage to the classic LEGO Castle set Majisto’s Magical Workshop. In this updated version, a lone wizard protects his cottage from a group of ghostly ninjas. Bright orange fire shoots from his hands, creating a formidable opponent against the glowing katanas.

The workshop seems to emerge from the landscape, utilizing a large rock formation as its foundation. The color scheme is striking with the combo of black, dark red and brown accented with gold, silver and a pair of earth blue window shutters. While stickers can often be hit or miss, the use of the runes sticker from 9473 The Mines of Moria over the balcony is perfect. The plant-covered roof with its heavy beams is a nice finisher for this sorcerous abode. Of additional note is the wonderful tree, which makes use of upside down spiky vines, giving the whole thing a pleasing shape.

Not only is this MOC impressive on the outside, it conceals a secret as well! As with its predecessor, the whole model opens to reveal a highly detailed interior featuring a library, bedroom, spiral staircase, sitting room and attic storage. I am particularly fond of the multiple fireplaces wending their way up the side of the building. Click to check out the full interior

Rather large for a small dwarf

We have featured many character builds by Eero Okkonen in his big burst of creativity a while ago, and now he is back, as active as ever. While Eero’s style varies slightly from build to build, this stout dwarf still stands out as an outlier.

The build uses a smart selection of colours to present a ceremonial armour, dark gray as steel (or more probably some sort of truesilver) along with gold, and well-blocked brown as leather in the gloves and pants. Kanohi Masks of control from second generation of Bionicle are used as the shoulderplates, and binoculars with Viking horns and a bucket handle are used as a dragon-like ornament on the dwarf’s helmet. But the best detail has to be the beard, using a car grille to achieve a convincing texture.

LEGO Löwenstein Castle set from BrickLink’s AFOL Designer Program [Review]

If you’re a dedicated LEGO fan, there’s a good chance you already use BrickLink.com to buy LEGO sets and individual elements. Now the 19-year-old marketplace has a new way of capturing the hearts and wallets of AFOLs (aka Adult Fans of LEGO). Announced last year, it’s called the BrickLink AFOL Designer Program, or ADP. With it, BrickLink is bringing a handful of fan-designed kits to market via a crowd-sourcing initiative. In many ways ADP resembles The LEGO Company’s own Ideas platform, but besides boasting larger payouts to designers, ADP also promises that the final sets will be virtually unaltered from the submitted designs. After a review period, 16 designs were first made available for a pre-ordering process with a minimum threshold of pre-orders before BrickLink would actually publish the kit. It’s a similar process to the way Kickstarter projects require a funding goal to be met. 13 of the designs met that goal and the largest model, Löwenstein Castle by builder Raziel Regulus, skyrocketed in popularity resulting in all 2,500 copies completely selling out during the pre-order phase. BrickLink has provided us an early review copy of the set, so let’s see how this fan-built model stacks up. Löwenstein Castle has 2,015 pieces and a $199.99 USD sticker price, though it is now sold out.

While the BrickLink ADP sets are not official LEGO sets and will not bear the LEGO logo, the sets do have The LEGO Company’s blessing. The AFOL Designer Program was initiated in affiliation with LEGO to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the LEGO brick, and each box will feature the official 60th-anniversary logo. The LEGO Company has also worked with BrickLink to provide elements explicitly for the sets. This is unlike any other aftermarket sets, which have always relied on pieces sourced out of regular LEGO sets (and consequently, those sets have a much higher price).

Click to read the full hands-on review

Not so tiny: This microscale LEGO Hogwarts uses over 75,000 pieces

In the Harry Potter films, Hogwarts looked massive and majestic. Although LEGO did a great job with the massive 71043 Hogwarts Castle set, builder Mathieu BL has built a microscale LEGO version of the castle that feels just as big as it should, despite its diminutive size. Part of this can be attributed to the surrounding terrain, which places the building within its proper context. The hills and cliff-sides have been carefully sculpted, utilizing a variety of colors and shapes to achieve a nice degree of realism. The sparkly water adds a touch of beauty, and it consists of loose trans clear and trans-medium blue elements mixed together to emulate the choppiness of the sea.

Turning the model around reveals a quidditch stadium behind the castle. A lot of time and care went into detailing this model. Mathieu spent over 1,200 hours designing and building Hogwarts, and nearly 75,000 pieces were used in its construction.

When photographed from certain angles, the little castle seems huge. Here, it looks absolutely stunning.

If you’d like even more LEGO Hogwarts in your life, be sure to check out our review of set 71043.

A place to find crystals, cupcakes and kidnapped little girls

LEGO Friends (and by extension, Elves) is a theme that had great success both with its target audience and beyond. Many builders love the themes for the exotic colours they brought to the palette, but some, like Isaac Snyder, take inspiration for builds from the Elves theme itself.

This little village has just enough buildings to look busy, and all of them have their own aesthetic while still looking very much like they belong together. My favourite techniques are the roofs, especially the purple windscreen used as an arch on the leftmost cottage. The clean lime grass broken up by printed tiles along with crystals and strange plants give the scene an otherworldly and profoundly magical feeling, just right for the Elves theme.

The castle of the dragon

Builder Corvus Auriac takes us to a magical place with this amazing render of a microscale castle. The towers are exquisitely detailed with just enough randomness to look real, while still feeling like an absolutely massive structure perched atop a rock. The dragon, named Beowulf, is one of the better microscale designs I’ve seen, actually have four legs like a proper dragon (and not a wyvern, which only has two). The frog for a head is perfect. As with all great microscale models, you’ll be rewarded by spending some time poring over the minuscule details to see what parts have been cleverly repurposed.

In this giant castle, every little detail is beautiful

Whether made out of real-life bricks or LEGO bricks, castle walls can be as simple as bricks stacked one on top of the other. However, some real castles have detailed walls, as does this LEGO castle by amenk sachio. The combination of sloped and arched grey bricks make the giant stone walls appear as if they were designed to be part of the finest renaissance château.

Particularly cunning is the use of socket joints to create arches: the wider end makes them naturally curve when stacked – an effect utilized here to great success. On top of the fine masonry, this castle is adroitly adorned with golden embellishments, with plant, animal, and weapon pieces used to create architectural details. My favourite detail of all is the repeated use of Witch-King crowns throughout, tying the entire fortress together.

Minifigure murder mystery in a magnificient mansion

The two things that stood out first in this build by XBrickmonster were the imperfect walls and the intricate windows made of LEGO elements ranging from claws and minfigure hands to tails and even Technic pins. That aside, the scene itself is a grand mystery waiting to be solved by our two detectives. While I leave the hard part to the experienced folks, I’m still trying to solve how that yellow frog got up there on the beams of the roof.

A microscale recreation of Predjama Castle from Slovenia

Seeing one of your national icons made in LEGO always gives a wholesome sense of civic pride, like the Mount Rushmore build we shared recently surely did for our American readers. However, living in a small country like Slovenia as I do can make such events scarce at best. Luckily for me, Isaac Snyder has given me this satisfaction and luckily for you, he has informed you about the largest cave castle in the world. Predjama Castle was first mentioned in 1274 as a small defensive fortress built inside a cavern with 6,5 kilometres of cave systems and a vertical 130-meter high cliff behind it. In 1570 it was expanded in the Renaissance style and remains this way to the present day.

The microscale build captures the real castle perfectly, as you can see from the reference used by Isaac. The build looks simple at first glance, until you start looking at the seams between bricks and notice how many difficult half-plate offsets and angles are scattered throughout the build. The landscaping is spot-on too, from the slanted cliff extending over the castle to the grass-covered hillside below. My favourite part is the staggered bricks on the side of the rightmost tower

Click to see the castle recreated in LEGO by local builders

When the city wall becomes the city

The smells of a medieval city must have made it a nightmare to live in one. On the other hand, if you lived in a house built on the wall, you could enjoy the fresh countryside air as well as the city’s protection. This handy situation is captured in this creation by Mountain Hobbit.

All the various heights of the roofs and the complicated angles really give an impression of homes built on the wall and then new houses built on top of the old. The mixing of colours is done carefully to create a weathered impression that is not overwhelming. For a diorama with only a handful of minifigs, almost all grouped at the gate in the center, it seems to be teeming with life.