Read the previous post - making the trees - here.

While I wasn’t really pre-designing much of the city, the buildings for the urban area were. I wanted a really futuristic design, so I went online and found myself a great picture of about 8 buildings in a futuristic way. This became my basis for the design. I assigned each building a number, and then numbered the building slots on my city to correspond. Building A is the tallest; Building B is the one behind on the left; Building C is the one in the middle (it has a tripod leg design); Building D is the one behind on the right; Building E is the one at the front on the right; and Building F is the small one at the left.

While I kept pretty much to the design that I printed from the net, Building A needed to have an elevator installed in it; so I cut two slits into the building (visible at the top), which would allow the elevator to slide up and down via a rod in the back. The other buildings have windows cut out, and where the yellow tape is visible, I attached some Christmas lights to the back; nothing is stuck in place yet here, but I wanted to test the look of the lights.

Building E has a wide arch with two legs, and here you can visibly see my ‘lip’ notion. The lip is wide enough to fit in the slot, but the rest of the leg is narrower (all the other buildings are wider than its lip; Building F at the front has a lip of 8cm wide, the building itself is 9cm wide, leaving 0.5cm margin at each side of the building which hides the lip/slot).

This picture clearly shows the buildings cut out and ready for the next step.

At right you can see behind the buildings. I attached small pieces of card to the back; one for support and balance, and the other was to attach the lights to the buildings. By making holes in those pieces of card, I could thread through some wire, and twist the wire around the lights’ lead, keeping them in place.

The lights themselves are threaded under the floors and up through those holes (see previous chapters for the view of the floor’s holes). As you can see, the buildings tilt a little, but this was rectified later with the addition of the backdrop, as well as securing everything in place with glue.

A wider view of the city box shows how the buildings look in place with the house. You can see the jackhammer at the left, without the Lego man attached.

A closer view of the stage right side of the urban area.

Luckily, I took measurements and stencils of all the buildings.

Read the next post - finishing the buildings - here.