This post is going to be a little different that usual. Instead of a tutorial, I will show you the process of how I made my biggest Plus-Plus build to date.
It all started Plus-Plus USA made a competition on Instagram for all ages. The goal was to come up with some kind of new architectural Plus-Plus build, which could be a bridge, building or anything like that.
I though this sounded really fun and wanted to really challenge myself.
Usually I make small or medium size builds, so this time I wanted to make something really big.
This was something I have never tried before. Yes I made builds with maybe 200 Plus-Plus blocks, but this was going to be surpass everything I have build before in size.
The building process
I started by doing a bit of brainstorming, but I quickly decided I wanted to make Big Ben. This build have also been requested multiple times after my tiny building series.
Next question was “which colors am I going to use?”. For this I needed a good picture of big ben.
The closest Plus-Plus color I could find was the “Beige” color, which is the very same that was used on the bridge in the Instagram picture.
However I don’t even owned any of these beige colors, so I had to find another alternative. So I ended up picking the basic yellow instead.
When that was done I ask myself. What is the most important part of this building going to be? Well, Big Ben is a clock tower, so that must be the clock of course.
Alright I would start with the clock and work from there, but I think this build should some kind of gimmick as well. Maybe I could make the clock was moveable?
Here are some early images of me building the clock.
I wanted it to have 4 clocks (one at each angle) and by building that I kinda knew how big the rest of the tower had to be.
The spire was redesigned maybe times, but this is what I ended up with.
Less look at the base plate now and the “story” of the build.
You might think, “what do mean by the story”?
Well by story, I mean that there should be some kind of event going on to make it more interesting.
When I went to Big Ben, some years ago, there was a lot of turists from many nations. There was also a lot of red double-decker busses, a bit of tree and of course road lights. Also when I wanted to go into the tower there was a british man selling tickets.
So what I did was just recreating a memory I had of visiting Big Ben.
This part was properly my strongest part. I was used to making micro builds of Plus-Plus, so this came very natural to me.
The people should be small and this was the smallest way to make Plus-Plus people that I know of.
I was also pretty happy with this double-decker bus, which I might make a tutorial on in the future.
Final build
So this is the photo I submitted and guess what. It ended up winning!
It took a lot of work and many hours of building, sorting colors and redesigning when it didn’t look as it should. I would also like to thank my girlfriend for her help and feedback along the way 🙏
This was such a super fun challenge, but don’t expect a tutorial on the full build since it would take ages to make.
Also I would like to mention that there are some honorable builds as well from the competition. I already saw one from @myplusplusaddiction, that was really great! So im looking forward to seeing more like this.
This post was a bit different than the usual stuff. I hope you learned something and maybe even motivated you to try to challenge yourself when you build your next Plus-Plus creation.
Let me hear what you think or if you have questions about the build.
