First a few pictures of my (finally) finished King's Castle MOC:
The other pictures on my Flickr page show some closeups and the different phases in which I have built the castle.
What led me to build this castle:
About a year ago I emerged from my dark ages and started building LEGO again. This happened when a friend asked me if I could fetch a LEGO set for his daughter at a store in the city where I live, because it was sold out where he lives. Hearing the bricks inside the box triggered me to go to the attic and open my own boxes of LEGO.
The first thing which came to my mind was rebuilding the yellow castle, which I got when I was six years old. I still remember how excited I was about it and how much I played with it. In my memory the yellow castle was big! Having a look at the instructions however I noticed the wals are not very high, a knight could step onto the wall from the back of his horse. As a kid I never thought about this, or at least didn't care about it at all.
But if I was going to build a castle again, I wanted it to be a bit more realistic, so it would at least be defensible. What I needed was an idea of scale, so after some online research I did a test using most of my old bricks, at a scale of (approximately) 1:45, which seemed to be ok.
While still thinking about the overall shape for my castle I first had to start collecting bricks and minifigs, because my old LEGO contained almost no (old) grey and the only castle minifigs I had were from the yellow castle. After buying 6 second hand castle sets I had a nice collection of minifigs, but by far not enough bricks. And I noticed that nowadays the castle sets contain a lot of panels and even bigger prefab pieces, which I really don't like. In my opinion this is not the idea of LEGO and I have only used them for structural support where they are (almost) not visible. Fortunately there are lots of BrickLink stores in the Netherlands, where I live, so getting the bricks I wanted was no problem.
While building my castle I regularly checked the internet for images of LEGO castles, as a sources of inspiration for building styles and techniques. That is how I found Classic-Castle.com. This website proved to be very valuable for me, especially the How-To pages and the castle MOCs forum. That is why I want to contribute something by sharing the pictures of my castle now that it is finally ready.
About the castle:
- Base size : 151 studs wide, 148 studs deep. The tower left behind extends 2 studs on the backside.
- Number of bricks : around 35.000 , difficult to say because I also used a lot of old bricks on places where the color didn't matter.
- Baseplates are not used in this MOC, but maybe next time I will.
- Basically the castle is viewable from all sides, but the backside outer wall is not detailed because it faces a wall in my living room. Therefore no pictures from the backside.
- As this is my first big castle MOC, I decided to keep it simple and avoid round shapes and odd angles, that's for later.
- The castle itself ended up being about 20% bigger (in each direction) than I first intended it to be...
- The castle actually does not have a name, so I called it King's Castle in the subject.
About the scene:
On the road in front of the castle we can see the soldiers of the king on the left side. In the carriage are two soldiers from the skeleton army who have been captured. On the right side there are a bunch of skeletons who have brought jewels as a ransom. The king has agreed and the prisoners are going to be exchanged for the jewels. On top of the front wall of the castle the king supervises the exchange of the prisoners. Behind him are his two sons. Eight archers stand ready in case something should go wrong.
In the courtyard of the castle life goes on as usual. The only thing that disturbs the peace is the wailing of another prisoner. He was arrested last night along with his friend in the woods behind the castle. He cannot remember what he did there, so perhaps delivering a sound beating will bring back his memory.
I hope you all like it.
Best wishes, Spherical.
Update Fri Jul 24, 2015 :
Firstly everyone thanks for the nice comments! Some questions were asked which I want to answer:
- About the little gatehouse which is built over the road in front of the castle: This building was not planned originally and I decided to build it because I had some bricks left after finishing the castle itself. Enemies cannot simply go around this gatehouse because the land on this side of it is very swampy. The road is the only safe way to the castle.
- Planning this castle: Before I started building I built the basic shapes of the keep, gate, great hall and towers at a scale of 1:4 compared to the final build. Then I arranged these shapes until the overall layout looked 'balanced'. During the build I filled in the details for each building.
- I took inspiration from images of real castles and lego castles, many from this site. I did not take much inspiration from lego castle sets. Although the building techniques from the offical lego sets are worth studying, most of the castles are not very realistic. They are designed to be fun for kids and I wanted my MOC to look a bit more realistic.
- The height of the castle is 106 cm (42 inches), rooftop of the keep, so it must be about 110 bricks high.
I look forward to seeing more from you in the future!
Each building looks fantastic, and I love the landscape too! Especially love the cathedral 
Truly magnificent!
