Inspiration and Design

Burg Rheinestein by Pedelecs (creative commons)

Now the inspirationy bit.  As I said before you need to have a good idea what you're attempting before you start building.  Having even just a basic idea gives you a gist of the approximate size of your project and gives you a place to start.  Pictures of real castles is an awesome place to draw inspiration from.  Look at tower and battlement designs,  the positioning of the keep and walls, and how the terrain compliments the castle both strategically and aesthetically.

This is where you are going to make you're first real important decision - are you going to attempt to make an exact copy of a real life castle (pretty much impossible), create your very own design (potentially equal parts brilliant or stupid), or something in between the two.  

I chose the last option.  As this is my first real castle MOC I wanted to build something that looked a little different than the normal concentric squares of big grey walls that make up most castles, but still sensible enough strategically to serve as a real world defensive structure.

To Europe!  European castles tend to be more elaborate than those found on the British Isles and often marry pleasing architecture with real defensive qualities.  Ideally, I draw the most inspiration from structures that are interesting to look at.  Try to find something that is a little asymmetrical, possibly with an interesting configuration of walls and towers.  Other features can also make a castle stand out, motes, auxiliary buildings, even the surrounding landscape can make a creation stand out.  And with so many talented builders making castles you will really want yours to be noticed.

Now I wouldn't normally give away where I drew my inspiration from.  I would much prefer that everyone thought I was simply brilliantly imaginative.  But what's the point in writing this blog unless I share everything?

I chose Burg Rheinstein.  Now I just want to reiterate that I am not creating a copy of this castle, just heavily borrowing from its design.  It's a fairly obscure castle so it's unlikely anyone will recognize it, especially once I pimp out those featureless grey walls with a heavy application of Gothic arch work.  It's important to keep in mind that although I will heavily model my castle from this design I have no idea exactly what the end product will be.  It may yet look vastly different.

The next step is to find your castle's "footprint".  Think of a footprint as a basic map of the castle's ground floor, it should clearly show tower and wall placement and the basic layout of the structure.  This should give you a basic idea of the final size of the model.  Even if it's too big or small you can modify the scale to better suit the space available and your collection.  It can be a good idea to layout some bricks to try and outline the castle's basic shape to get a better idea of how it is going to be executed.  But there are other ways to determine scale.

You may want to make a sketch of some important features.  Remember that you are building with LEGO so try to stay away from curves.  Mostly all the LEGO structures I have seen with tight curves need to make some sort of aesthetic sacrifice to pull off a round shape.