It's only a little experimentation at the moment. However, I'm planning on putting two Ewok Village platforms side-by-side (with a little modification to the tree trunks), and then have a spiral staircase inspired by what you see in
The Fellowship of the Ring to connect with the ground rather than a ladder. The forest floor is going to be whatever feels natural, though I want a spring/pool of some kind, perhaps similar to the night elf moonwells in WoW in that I want it to have a mystical feel rather than look like it's there as a water source.
I'll also have a dock of some kind, at least eventually; I'm not sure what the design on that one will be, but I want to have a large navigable river between the human town and the elven village, so I need a dock of some kind. I might utilize one of the old 16x16 island baseplates to place one of the Ewok Village tree trunk pillars on, which would mean the village juts out over the water, and then rebuild those pillars to support a dock. Not sure. It's a nice idea, though.
I had to put them aside when I couldn't get it done for BrickFair, and I haven't worked on it just yet. I got new bins so I'm attempting more sorting, and I was fiddling with lighting techniques for the basement on my human tavern. My next experiment is supposed to be terrain, as there's a new technique that popped up at BrickFair this year involving nets as the basis for plates and titles, which allow for greater flexibility; I want to use it for terrain, and hopefully to get it to work before someone else in my LUG does it.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
And then I have a show at the National Air & Space Museum, so I should build a moonbase. But that's not Classic Castle, and so we shall not speak of it.
But I promise, I will get on to that elven village. I just wish I had the free time and working hands (I have arthritis, can't even grip a pen or pencil for more than five minutes, and I'm constantly dropping bricks) to do all the stuff in my head.
I can tell you what's working, though. Use light tan, dark tan, and reddish brown for the wood colors, and then add in the accent colors from the Elves sets to make each treetop "hut/house" look different. Then just vary the building elements and you've got different little homes in the trees. What doesn't seem to work quite as well is all the purple and pink branches, but a few of those work as accents rather than a standard color; you can make them serve the same purpose as blossoms, to break up the color-monotony and seem like the tree-branch equivalent of putting a wild azalea bush in your front garden.
What I might wind up doing is getting a third Ewok Village set to serve as a higher layer, supported over the other two platforms; but that would require more planning, and I'm not sure how to manage the transition properly; the spiral staircase design requires a bit of clearance at the moment, and building a second one for the second level might be a trick.
Castle Theme Leader for BrickFair Virginia.
And in case your wondering here are the "Girl Parts"
