I mentioned a while ago my intent on entering the CC Battles Contest. i've had my entries completed for over a week now, but I finally got to photographing them today. It's my first year entering the annual contest, but it was exciting (and difficult) trying to build something more focussed towards action rather than structure. As such structures kinda feature heavily as backdrops in both the entries, but I like how the battles turned out, and they're both completely different from each other.

Attack on Widmore is a purely a classic-castle battle with Forestmen attacking a Crusader fort, separated only by a river. The idea originally was to have trees bridging across the river and the actual fort a lot more crumbled and overgrown, in a state of neglect, but now it kind of contrasts with the greenery across the river, which I like. The fort has a small interior too. It's completely unnecessary given the criteria of the contest, but i'm weird like that. The river is SNOT too which I think is a first for me, but I like the smoothness of how it turned out- it's something i'll be doing again.

The Battle of Mortia on the other hand is a lot more in keeping with that of the current Lego Castle line, with necromancers and skeletons- it's also got a lot of the newer colours too such as the dark-green. Generally i'm a fan of neither, but it was fun building in a new style and colour-way to what I usually do. Originally the battle was going to be below and over a bridge (again with dark green), but I needed somewhere for the Necromancer mastermind, so the tower was included. It wasn't going to be as high either, but, well...I got carried away.

At this stage i'm not sure if there will be a third entry or not. A lot of my bricks have been used and the thought of de-assembling and sorting those two entries frightens me completely. The contest ends on the 5th of April though, so I may build a smaller entry yet. It depends how forthcoming new ideas are.

 

The annual Battles Contest was announced over at Classic-Castle by Josh Wedin last weekend.

I'm always building (or more often than not sorting bricks), but contests and competitions like this and the Colossal Castle are always good excuses to bring out the bricks, especially with prizes on offer. Not that winning is everything, and it's foolish and egotistical to aim for success anyway, but it's always a good chance to show off what you've got and soak-up the entries and ideas of everyone else. I know that in the few year i've re-developed my interest of Lego, I have learned a lot from these kind of contests.

The closing date for entries is the 5th of April, and forgetting all other current commitments, i'm hoping to knock out a couple of entries, embarassingly, ideas i've been plotting for a while. But i've started all the same, two entries in fact, and while it's easy to spend an entire day at the weekend building, it's difficult going back through the week or finding time and enthusiams later on, much like my new bad habit when it comes to videogame as of late. Then there's the constant problem of finding myself out of specific bricks or colours solved only by a binge-spending trip to Bricklink, but all hobbies are expensive, right?

I hope so.