Crocker Museum - Inspiration Mine - LEGO MOC

 

 

Last month's LUG meeting (see also this post) ended with a prompt for the next competition: Crocker and/or Underground.

The LUG's leadership maintains a bank of prompt ideas, which is where "Underground" came from. Because the September meeting was the day before CrockerCon, a one-day local comics convention at the Crocker Art Museum, and they wanted to have some appropriate builds on their table, the other prompt was the Crocker museum itself.

I had an idea right away—a micro-scale Crocker over a cave in which an artist creature draws inspiration from the galleries above—and sketched it out on a post-it note, then refined it on a gridded index card:

The grid was particularly useful as I plotted out the buildings. I used Google aerial and street views to get a good sense of the buildings and their relative orientations (hot tip: set the street view to show autumn or winter, so there isn't foliage to get in the way of your view). I also took photos of my own to help ensure it was as accurate as possible.

The result was successful, and had the added challenge of having to fit within a bell jar (from the Dollar Tree), as I'll show later. First, the microbuild:

Top view, looking south. You can see the modern gallery on the right, and the older buildings (the mansion built by the Crocker family after their post-Transcontinental Railroad completion European trip, and donated to the city of Sacramento) on the left. A courtyard between the two has a wide waterfall (the blue 1x2 slope) which is where the Sacramento Brick Builders' display table was located.

 

Southwest view, showcasing the massive redwood tree beside the mansion's old staircase. A 1x2 grille forms the gate at the entrance, under a 1x2 round plate forming the rotunda above.

I used 1x2 grilles to represent the streets running around the building (I-5 is the one running left-to-right in the bottom-right corner of this photo), and placed the 2x2 gallery section on a 2x2 jumper plate to orient it at the appropriate angle. I also used 1x1 SNOT brackets and a 1x2 slope (on the left) and tile (on the right) to join the rotated section to the rest of the building.

The back of the museum, looking north-east. Here you can see a second 1x2 slope & 1x1 SNOT bracket to connect the various wings, as well as a flower to represent the rose garden in the south-east corner of the grounds.

 And finally the last corner, looking north-west. The trees here are a planted courtyard, and the squareish turret (which is a separate Victorian-era house joined by a modern wing to the primary mansion) houses the ancient Asian collection as well as the modern pottery collection (it's also the first photograph of the actual buildings above, with the sculpture and fence in front of it).

Below this tidy squared-off circle is a much more chaotic (and appropriately-so) section:

 

As described in my original idea, an artistic dwarf is mining the inspiration dripping down from the museum above, and using it to create his own masterpiece.

• the artwork tile (a melting clock, very artistic indeed) is from a Vidiyo set
• the carpet tile is from Antonio's Animal Sanctuary
• the yellowish-green teeth, as well as the spookily-cavernous stickered tiles in the rear, are from the Newbury Juice Bar
• the dwarf's torso is from CMF Series 25 Fierce Barbarian (with the arms put on backwards because it looked better that way in this position)
• the dwarf's legs are from is from the Dungeons & Dragons CMF Halfling Druid
• the beard and hair from the Lego DreamZzz Dream Village, specifically from the Dreamling blacksmith
• the pickaxe is appropriately from a Minecraft set
• the paintbrush is from the CMF Series 4 Artist
• the easel is my own design, using 1x3 plates with two clips
• the top of the underground portion has 1x4 plates with 2 studs to allow the 8x8 circle top piece to be placed on top, Modular-style:
  

 

All together, it fits within the bell jar, making use of hinges and SNOT buiding techniques to fill out the sides:

 

On the whole, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, combining microscale and constrained, habitat-style building techniques, while also paying homage to the inspiration I've "mined" from the museum myself (especially the work of the Old Masters of centuries past).

And speaking of gridded index cards, I used one to help my husband plan out his entry for the challenge. On the second floor of the old mansion is a vast swath of intricate mosaic, with—as the tour guides are wont to point out—a single pair of mislaid tiles. These were done intentionally, much as how tapestrymakers and weavers would miss a stitch, as part of the masonic and craftsman tradition: both as a bulwark against human hubris and an acknowledgement of the imperfection that is any work of human hands. To that end, he made a mosaic of 1x1 round plates, with the mislaid section raised on a 2x2 plate:

 The CrockerCon was very interesting to see in person, and it was very satisfying to have both of our builds on display with so many other great pieces. The one downside of building so small is that it can be easy to overlook them amid larger constructions...but it's much easier to store the final product when it doesn't take up so much space: