Japanese Red-Crowned Cranes

To celebrate the 2000 supporters milestone (yes I know, it is not an official milestone, but still a pretty good result!) I designed this mini version of a Red-Crowned Japanese Crane.

I tried to capture the most important and peculiar details such as the red crown, the yellow beak, the long thin black legs and the beautiful black and white feathers of the wings!

The build also features Joey the frog (read the previous update if you haven't met him yet!), some of the river details and a small cattail, all of this in less than 50 pieces!

I hope you like it :)

There was something missing in my creation... but now it's complete!

Say welcome to Joey the frog!

Hi :)

Thank you so much for the support my submission got so far, it's really appreciated!

Today I would like to share with you a bit of the origin of the build.

Everything started in January, one evening when I was in a bookstore and an interesting cover in the Oriental books section caught my attention: I do not remeber the title of the book, unfortunaly, but I do remember that it was full of beautiful water-color drawings of animals such as frogs, koi fish, elephants and, of course, cranes.

The style, the minimalistic usage of colors and the poses of the animals gave me an amazing sense of calmness and tranquility.

In that moment I decided that I wanted to make something, I didn't know what yet, but something inspired by those artworks.

In the following days I tried to make some digital drawings of the same subjects I saw in the book, trying to capture the feelings I got from them, but with no success at all.

Everything went silent for several months, I had other priorities and the idea of making art slipped in the back of my mind... until one day, unexpectedly, I got this big flash in front on my eyes: LEGO!

I don't know why I didn't think about it earlier, Lego bricks are a great way to make art and express feelings!

I immediately made a pencil skecth of the idea: a diorama with two beautiful cranes, similar to the ones I saw in the book, a big red sun in the sky and a blossoming cherry tree.

The design process took approximately one week.

I started to design the wings of the cranes: I wanted to represent the details of the feathers and the change of color from white to black. I tried several designs, but at the end I decided to go with the one you see in the image. I think it captures the texture of the wings quite well!

The legs didn't need any iteration, they are exactly how I pictured them in my mind in the first moment.

I struggled a bit trying to design the neck. I tried different pieces but nothing seemed to work, until I found a great one: the middle section of a dinosaur tail!

After adding the sun and the cherry tree, I noticed that there was something missing, the background was empty. So I decided to add one last detail: the outline of a typical Japanese pagoda.

At the moment I only built the diorama digitally, the next step is to build it in real life! Stay tuned for more updates.

Thank you for reading this, I hope my build gives you the same calm I felt looking at the drawings in the book :)

Daniele