Building a Simple but Elegant Base

Sometimes presentation is half the battle. You've just built a beautiful vignette, but now you need a base for it! Now of course, you could just make a simple square one with plates and tiles. Boooring. Instead, build one like this!

This is a design I developed a couple years ago for microscale space scenes. But it would work just as well for a castle vignette or really any other type of scene. While the example shown has a 14x14 stud build area, the design is easily scalable. You could shrink it down as small as 8x8 (or possibly even smaller), and as large as your heart desires.

Here is how it's constructed. The bottom shell (the dark grey part) is basically comprised of two halves, each with studs facing in the opposite direction. In order to make them fit together, a Technic connector (yellow) with 1/2 pins is sandwiched between two 2x2 corner bricks. The top plate layer (light grey) is then attached using 1x4 SNOT bricks (also yellow).

Thanks to the extreme flexibility of our favorite interlocking plastic brick system, there is usually more than one way of achieving a certain shape or function. Tyler Sky (Bricksky on Flickr) built an almost identical base using a slightly different technique.

And finally, here are a few examples of the base being put to good use.