Note also that this is a very busy "micro-build", I abstracted away tons of surface detail, but that doesn't mean I had to throw away everything and go super minimalist. I knew that if I could map those key shapes to bricks, the lion's share of the design was done. In my case, the first half dozen strokes I put on paper were the curved outer wall, the knife edge of natural rock extenting 700 feet in the air (Denathor's diving board) the tower on the top and the hillside behind. When forced to throw together a thumbnail that quickly, one's mind naturally gravitates to the 'key' features. I put away the reference, picked up a pad of paper and tried to draw the shape from memory in under a minute. The first exercise I did in the design/build had nothing to do with LEGO. When I tackled my Minas Tirith build I was working from a bookend/jewelry box. This same concept of "find the essential form and go from there" holds true regardless of scale. (The shot below does have mini-figures, but it really is out of scale, the statutes are only about half of what they should be for mini-fig scale). For example, in my Pillars of the Kings piece, it was all about the statues outstretched hands - people might forgive the flat faces or the cheesy beard, but if the hands didn't say Argonath, I was dead in the water. ![]() ![]() This feature (or features) represents the heart of the build, it can't be abstracted away and if I get it wrong, the whole effort is going to fail. Personally, I like to start with some sort of reference or model and figure out what it is about that image that 'defines' the piece for me. Once you free yourself from the expectation that the model needs to "fit" with mini-figures, the question of scale gets blown with open, and there probably is never a right or wrong answer to it. You have a palette of core shapes to draw (in some cases a very extensive palette) and just need to develop an eye for how a model breaks down into those forms. It's no different when your media is LEGO brick. Two of the first lessons given is how to "break down" the human form into the essential masses (a collection of draw-able spheres and cylinders) and how to flow those masses together to capture the critical flow that will trick the viewer into seeing a human in the rough sketch even without the surface detail one would expect from other media like photography. Most people who take, for example, a figure drawing class can't draw a human body on day one, but they can draw an oval or a trapezoid and with a bit of shading those flat shapes can suggest spheres and cylinders. ![]() Typically this means breaking things down into simpler forms that _suggest_ rather than depict the original idea. From an artist's perspective, abstraction is the conscious effort to remove details without compromising the essential form of whatever it is you're trying to render. I think the biggest thing to remember when building small (whatever your definition of small happens to be) is abstraction. I make no claims to being an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I typically don't work in mini-figure scale (mostly just due the subject matter I choose) so I can offer some personal opinions if it would help.
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