Relief Map of Germany

One of the main brickifying struggles with this model was to find a good representation of the few rivers. To cope with the very small scale I originally used the cables to get them as thin as possible. But that lead to the "problem" of needing the clips to hold them and in the end having the rivers "pop out" of the scenery.

So for this update I tried some other idea to illustrate the rivers on my map - this time using simple flat tiles. Even if that might be a bit too "wide" in relation to the scale / rest of the map I guess that looks better and much more "map like" than the initial approach.

As time flies by and my beloved map-projects lacks still some votes to "survive" the first round - if you like it and have not yet it would be a great time for your supporting vote :-) - and even if you already voted, maybe you have someone to share with who might like it, too. Crossing fingers to get behind the first 100.

Took me some time to realize it ;-) - I made a mistake reading the BOM for that model and put the wrong piece count in my description - the set does "only" consist of about 550 pieces, please apologize this error.

First, I want to thank all of you for your kind support and nice comments so far!

Based on some thoughts, interesting discussions and inspiration coming up within the comments and the online communities I take part in, I post two additional renderings with some slight changes / additions:

First, I tried to find some small representation for the quite famous island of Sylt, which should still work with the very small scale, and I “sharpened” the border to Denmark in the north of Germany a bit.

The second change took place in the southern area – I do not know, why I started the massive Alps with some brown bottom / mid (and snow on the top). Some simple hint (thank you Ingo) made me recolour them in some shades of grey (ok, may sound funny), matching their rocky stone character much better. And as an example for further ideas I will write about below this, I followed some cliché and placed a beer mug somewhere south ;-).

General thoughts and ideas:

In general, the landmarks and small icons I chose are of course by no means “complete” or any more important or better than many other typical settings and landmarks one could use to illustrate several regions throughout Germany. So one idea that came up, would be to provide some more nano-items for different regions and leave it to the builder which one each of them wants to use or show. Maybe there could just be a bunch of bricks everyone could use to construct their own favorite landmark and place. Same could be done with the rivers and other waters, of course, there are many other important, well-known and beautiful rivers throughout Germany that I left out, just to keep it “simple” and not flood the landscape with too much detail.

In addition, would it not be some funny thought to provide some tiny flag or pole one could put onto the map to mark her or his actual position or home?

Finally – just dreaming and kidding – although I (up to now) have only applied the idea to Germany, one could create some collectable series of this kind, representing any country as such small relief map.