Desert Tower
Out in the fields, two guards stand watch over the local storage tower.
A small Castle build I made during the summer of 2022. More pictures on Flickr and Instagram.
Conception
The origin of this build came from when I was building the Swamp market, I noticed that the colors I used for the “inside” of the defensive wall matched nicely with each other. That gave me the idea to try to design a building with just those colors.
The colors in question are Medium Nougat, Dark Orange and Dark Tan. (And as you can see it was also later decided by the community that we would have the same color combo on the roofs of the builds.)
Initial Concepts
At first I was thinking bigger and was working on some type of aqueduct instead of a tower.
But that concept was downscaled to a tower to make the build cheaper and faster to realize. I originally planned to make the tower a few bricks taller, but when I saw that the theme for Skaerbaek Fan Weekend 2022 was castle, I immediately wanted to submit it as an entry. But to make it possible for the build to be displayed together with other castle builds, I had to shrink the build again to fit it inside their display cabins.
Design notes
The Tower
I usually build my buildings as squares, but this time I wanted to challenge myself a little and avoid that. I managed to make the tower in a sturdy octagonal shape with this internal design.
The floor on the top was made with 30565 pieces and simple plates. Filling out the space and leaving no gaps against the walls were not a concern with this build. I decided to keep that part simple.
The door presented a challenge. If there had existed a door frame in Medium Nougat I would have used that out of convenience. But the lack of it forced me to be creative and build something a bit more elaborate.
The tiles for the hinges are normally used to represent engine blocks. I’m happy I managed to make use of them in a Castle build.
The Trees
Everytime I want to add some trees or bushes to a build, I try to find some new technique to use. This time I also wanted to try to use the palm leaf pieces I seldom use. Usually I’m not that good at finding a new and/or good design, but this time I’m very happy with the results.
The idea behind the design was to make them as dense as possible. I wanted them to create two walls of green on the sides of the tower.
The Minifigs
In case you are curious about which pieces are used to make the minifigs, some of them are the following:
Worker
Guard
- Headgear: Star wars helmet 57900
- Torso: 973pb4146c01 from Ninjago minifig Gravis
- Legs: 970c86pb04 from the CMF Series 8 Conquistador.
- Shield: Boromir’s 91884
Reception / Recognition
Besides a few likes on Instagram and Flickr, the build was picked up and featured on Tips and Bricks. It was nice to see that someone else liked my tree techniques.
/Henrik