Brave New Lego World: day CXI: 2nd Pick-A-Brick Order GET!

Day 111, 04/06/2013:

I put in another shop.lego.com purchase last week, though this order was different from my other ones in that it’s mostly pieces instead of sets. I once again set an order cost for over 150AUD to get the free shipping, and the first half -and the main cost- of the order arrived:

What do we have here aye? 😀

I had finally gotten around to digitally designing all the extras I need for the Lego City city (at least on tables 1 and 2), ranging from more footpaths, driveways, custom airport front+back areas and fleshing out the water area. Whilst I was unable to order the large baseplates I needed (I’ll be sourcing them from BrickLink instead/if I can), I managed to get all the pieces I needed from shop.lego.com… Over 900 individual pieces:

Why it’s Lego! Lots and lots of Lego! \o/

Thankfully, the pieces didn’t arrive in just a plastic bag like my first PAB order did; was a little worried I’d get a busted bag with hardly any pieces left in it…

Much like Lego.com‘s packaging, the box is pretty sturdy, though in this case it doesn’t need to protect an inner box. The other items in my order (that shipped separately) were 2 of the new 2013 40054 Summer Scene and a free Ironman figurine + drone (“LEGO® Marvel Super Heroes Iron Man™ Drone”).

Aaand inside is their usual PAB bag, but this one’s (for once) chockablock full o’ wonderfully new, fresh Lego (straight from Strykow, Poland apparently .___.):

Approximately 900 pieces of Lego!!

I’m just hoping that I didn’t miss any bricks when I spent 4+ hours individually adding each Lego brick type to the PAB website… otherwise I’m just gonna have to buy more Lego ;P

I’ll be adding in the new sections bit by bit later on, and also showing a comparison between the digital design and the final reality. The city’s finally starting to look more like a cohesive mega-set instead of lots of sets just placed haphazardly around the tables 😀

Brave New Lego World: day LXX: Lego City Footpath DESIGN!

Day 70, 24/04/2013:

Even though the road baseplates have a 6-stud wide footpath space on either side, I didn’t really consider them to be a footpath, given they were the same colour as the road, and also at the same level. It was only after seeing how a proper footpath could be done at this site a few weeks ago that I got serious about it and decided to focus some time on it. Whilst I could have taken the easy route and done the same sort of footpath as on the site (by using lots of 6×8 medium stone grey plates), I thought I’d try to come up with something more like a footpath you’d see out in the real world. I started by checking out various footpath designs pulled from an Google image search, then designing something with the Lego Digital Designer program:

Lego footpath ideas

I tried quite a few variations of a design where there was an obvious divider between the sections to try an emulate the gaps in footpaths like in this photo but couldn’t get it to look right. Then I tried to break up the monotonous gray with different coloured edges, but that didn’t also quite work. So I then tried to add a grass strip like in  this photo, which I thought worked. I tried putting various types of plants on it to maybe create this organic fence between the road and footpath, but probably won’t do it (for starters, plants/trees are expensive to purchase). The final design I’ve gone with is this:

Final footpath design

It has a 2-stud wide strip of ‘grass’ close to the road, separated by a 1-stud wide  medium stone gray ‘curb’, then a 3-stud wide medium stone gray footpath for people to walk on. Considering the footpath is only 6 studs wide, things are much narrower than reality is. By making the sections 8 studs long, it means I need a perfect 4 sections to cover one road baseplate (which are 32×32 studs in size), and by offsetting their placement by 4 studs, I can have them connect and hold adjacent baseplates in place :).

Probably what really kicked off this whole endeavour was Lego’s free* shipping promotion which goes from the 9th of April until the 31st of August (*free if you spend more than $150 T_T). I figured I would start with getting enough pieces to cover both sides of the road that goes down table 1, which would be 4 32×32 sections; a total of 128 pieces. This only came to 28.80AUD so I purchased some additional Lego items, pushing the order to 153.76AUD. Yes these items are full retail prices and I could get them cheaper elsewhere but Lego’s packaging is usually really good and I needed the order to hit 150+AUD 😛 Plus I got some bonus items with the order too (mini sopwith camel plane and a Lego Chima poster)!

The footpath pieces -and only the footpath pieces- arrived today (less than a week after ordering!):

Footpath pieces GET!

The other sets were sent in a separate box, whereas this came in just a parcel bag.

It was only when I was adding the pieces to the road plates that I realised that I hadn’t taken into consideration driveways @_@

Footpath in front of the garage

I’ll have to work out what driveways and how the footpaths join with them later; most likely do it at the same time I come up with a way to have the footpaths go around a corner. Not that I’m in a rush considering Lego’s free shipping goes until September! 😀