100 Days of Trees

Techniques, , ,

This was a hard summer for me. I had (and am continuing to have) personal struggles that have dragged on my LEGO® motivation. The one thing that I kept a hold of was my tiny little trees. I posted a hundred trees on Instagram over the course of 100 days.

The thing that I like the most about building in microscale is the process of distillation, reducing the subject to the most essential elements. Building tiny trees is a perfect example of this, as it is impossible to replicate the natural chaos of trunk and branches and leaves. Let alone the riot of textures and colors that nature provides.

So it becomes necessary to reduce the tree to volumes and suggestions of texture and complexity.

This small selection of elements can create a wide variety of organic forms. The addition of color creates even more possibilities.

The more I played with trees, the more I wanted to explore. I decided to try to post 100 trees over 100 days, a perfect Instagram project. To keep myself from being lazy, I decided that they should all be different configurations of elements. It would be too easy to fill out the 100 with color variations.

I should make it clear that I don’t claim ownership of any of these designs. They wouldn’t exist without all of the talented builders that I follow.

Without further rambling, here are the trees:

So, yeah. That is a lot of trees. Such a wide variety of trees, ranging from abstract to representational. They run a gambit of perceived scales as well, with some designs being suitable for shrubbery and others appearing rather fixed in their sense of volume.

Now that I’ve built so many cool designs, I want to explore it further. I plan to do color studies for the best designs, to explore how color changes the perception of form. I’d also like to explore how the designs change when used in multiples versus single individuals.

So many options. I think that I have a book worth of material developing in my head. Look for more in the future.

Hopefully this inspires you to build and create amazing landscapes.

Keep building and enjoy!