48×48 Castle Prize: Build Log

Micro-scale castles have become one of my favorite subjects to build, and also some of my most popular creations.

For this model I decided on the colorscheme first: bley rockwork with tan buildings topped with red roofs. I settled on this scheme mainly because I was a bit tired of building bley micro-castles, and wanted to see what sort of new ideas using an alternative color might produce.

I like to get a bunch of small elements out and just mess around with various building designs when starting a micro scene.

I try to come up with quite a lot of different towers, buildings, and wall options so that when actually building the castle into the landscape I can just plop various sections down and see how things will look. Dark green ended up giving a nice contrast to the tan and bley, while also being a color I had a good variety of landscape elements in.

Building upside down can often be helpful in micro buildings, in which case I usually invert the stud direction by using a 2×2 round tile with center hole combined with a 2×2 jumper plate. You can see that combination under quite a lot of the buildings on the left in this image.

Elevation change in the landscape is a great way to add visual interest to the model, so I built up the cliff on the right, stepping up the buildings to match.

A few dark green elements here and there on the rockwork simulated moss and kept there from being large boring bley areas. Plenty of SNOT elements helped make smoother transitions at various places in the rockwork. Especially around the bottom edge where I aim to achieve a very organic shape when working with an irregular base.

Once again I used grill bricks as stairs inside the castle walls. While the main tower makes liberal use of tan headlight bricks for windows, with sideways 1×6 tiles at each corner to simulate buttresses.

The square 2×2 tower perched precariously on the left side ended up being switched out for the round tower visible off the build on the right. I preferred the round shape due to its contrast with the square gatehouse and large keep on either side.

A long temple looking structure fit nicely next to the keep, and allowed me to repeat the inverted ice cream cone column design from one of the first buildings.

And here is the finished model! You can just see the roofs of a couple small towers I ended up adding behind the keep here – once again repeating a design used earlier in the scene.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how you approach micro-scale building, and as usual you can stay tuned for more tutorials, MOCs, and build logs!