Black Falcons – HarrisBricks

Falkenholt on The Brothers Brick!

Dale — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 08:17:05 +0000

I have just found out that my castle build, The Fortress of Falkenholt was featured on The Brothers Brick.

Thank you to The Brothers Brick team for featuring my build, it really means a lot to see my build being shared far and wide!

I would especially like to take the time to thank Chris Burden for his awesome and very kind review, which you can read here.

Naming my castle build

Dale — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 16:15:17 +0000

I have been mulling over the idea of what to name my castle build for a while and today I have finally made up my mind.

I wanted to give it a name that referred to the two main elements of the build, the castle and the forest and if I could, the two factions – the Knights of the Black Falcon and the Forest Guard (my versions of the Black Falcons and Forestmen factions) – and for this reason I have settled on the location name of ‘Falkenholt’, literally the German spelling of falcon, combined with the Old English word for forest/wood/grove, ‘holt’.

The complete name of my build will be ‘The Fortress of Falkenholt’.

I wanted to use the word fortress as a nod to 6074 Black Falcon’s Fortress but I also like the idea that people will automatically assume that the castle is the fortress, but there are actually two fortresses in Falkenholt, the castle itself and the concealed underground/forest stronghold of the Forest Guard.

I think it fits the build really well, what do you think?

Designing my castle

Dale — Sat, 09 Oct 2021 13:08:12 +0000

Recently I have been posting some progress photos of my current build – a large scale castle/landscape build which I hope to show at Brickvention 2022 – and this has drawn some great feedback as well as a few questions, so I thought I might go into detail on a few of the choices I have made and the reasons behind them.

First and foremost the aim of this build is to showcase what I love about those classic mid-80s Castle sets and specifically my two favourite factions, the Black Falcons and the Forestmen. I am drawing inspiration from the original sets featuring each faction, specifically what I loved about them as a child and aim to contrast that with what appeals to me as an adult builder.

I started the process as I always do when looking to revisit a classic theme, by looking at all the original sets in as much detail as I could find.

There are several specific sets that I paid close attention to, either because I had them as a child – and vividly remember building and playing with them – or because I can remember studying them longingly in the LEGO catalogue as a child.

I have already talked a little bit about 6066 Camouflaged Outpost here, but the main castle set that I wanted to concentrate on is the one that gave the faction their name, 6074 Black Falcon’s Fortress.

There are a few design elements from this castle that I believe are must-haves for a Black Falcons castle, not many, but I wanted to make sure my new castle carried them through from the original sets.

Angular/polygonal tower designs

To me, nothing says LEGO castle like those angular/polygonal towers with the 45 degree corners. There is no way my castle was going to have square (or indeed round) gatehouse towers.

Light grey walls

I know there are later sets with predominately black and dark grey castles but in the 1986, when I was six years old, LEGO castles were light grey. Light grey says castle as far as I am concerned and I did not even think once about using another colour.

Tudor-y elements

Whilst I never had this castle as a child I always coverted the tudor panel, it was such an interesting detail. I decided that this little piece of style information had to be referenced in my castle build and it would bring an added benefit in that there would be several materials to work with in my castle, not just stone, making it more visually dynamic and interesting to look at.

Black tiled roof

As with the light grey stone work, it is clear that Black Falcons castles have black tiled roofs. I did think about using another colour like dark grey or dark brown, but decided to stick with black.

Okay so once we get past looking at the sets for inspiration, the next step was to look at all the castle builds ever (or as many as I could find online).

By looking at builds that have come before I am doing two things – firstly – I don’t know all possible building techniques and styles, so looking at where others have gone before gives me a good idea of what techniques I like the look of – as well as what I don’t believe is successful and would want to avoid in my build – and secondly, I want to make sure that my castle is different from what others have built in the past.

Half and half

My castle will be half of the finished display, with a large underground cave network as the other half comprising of the Forestmen’s hideout. My aim is to have two similarly weighted strongholds side by side.

Once the terrain elements were largely completed I roughed in the footprint of the castle, using duplo to build up height as required (this will be completely hidden from view when the build is displayed).

Varied ground level

I knew that I wanted to have several levels in the castle including underground dungeon like spaces, but also that the ground level in the castle would vary as if it was built to fit the landscape rather than the other way around. A lot of castle builds are built on one level, and I reckon they are missing an opportunity to create a more visual interesting – and dare I say it, more realistic – castle.

Wood

I decided pretty early on that my castle would have wooden elements to break up all the grey, these would take the form of walkways at the top of the curtain walls, lean-to like structures inside the walls, the internal floor structures of each building as well as the ‘Tudor-y’ bits mentioned above.

Cross sections

Another element of my castle that I am trying to make as realistic as possible is the cross sections, where a building is cut in half I am showing the interior rubble between the stone inner and outer wall as well as the beams holding up the wooden structures and floors cantilevered into the walls.

Texture, texture everywhere

As you have hopefully noticed, I am aiming to use texture as much as possible in walls, ground and floors, my preference is for single colour texture, where each colour represents a particular material eg: light grey for stone, reddish brown for wood etc. I know that it can look great to mix several colours together to suggest graduation of tone and texture, however I aim to do this through contrasting textures.

A note about contrast

I have had a couple of people comment and tell me that I should be using dark grey for the stone around my castle, or for contrasting details like corbels and lintels, and I have seen that there are a lot of castle builds out there that follow this convention however in the real world castles are built from stone quarried as close as possible to where they are built. If the surrounding stone is light grey the castle is also going to be predominately light grey. I understand completely why other builders might want to use a contrasting colour for stone around their castle to make the castle itself stand out better against the landscaping or to make certain architectural details stand out from the walls but I am aiming instead to use different textures to signify cut stone versus natural stone.

Anyway, so here is a photo showing where I am up to as of today. I am still a fair way from completing my castle build, but a lot of the design decisions and techniques have been nailed down now, I would love to know how you think it is coming along!

Sneak peek: The Castle

Dale — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 16:00:40 +0000

Some of you may have seen some sneak peeks of my current build on my Instagram or in some of the LEGO Castle groups on Facebook but I have decided to post regular updates here too.

I am currently in the process of building a large Castle themed display pitting my two favourite Castle factions, the Black Falcons and the Forestmen against each other in a forested landscape with a castle which I hope to display at Brickvention 2022 in Melbourne next year in January.

So far I have built most of the terrain and underground cave network for the Forestmen’s hideout, and I have progressed quite a bit with the as yet unnamed castle. Here are some photos, though please be aware that they are not at all polished!

New Falcons Custom Shield

Dale — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 08:04:56 +0000

This year I started collaborating with NiceBricks in Monaco on some new products based on my Knights of the Black Falcon designs and you can now purchase the first product from this collab, New Falcons Custom Shield directly from the NiceBricks website.

Daniele at NiceBricks specialises in high-quality custom printed minifigs and injection molded accessories. You can check out his range of products at nicebricks.com

The shields are made of injection molded ABS plastic and are pad printed in blue, black and silver by Nicebricks using my custom Knights of the Black Falcon design.

You had better hurry on over to the NiceBricks website if you would like to purchase them as there is only a limited amount available!

Black Falcon shields

Dale — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 06:33:47 +0000

One of the most iconic elements of the classic LEGO castle sets (1978-1997) would have to be the shields with their pad printed coat of arms designs, and whilst they are all pretty iconic designs, my first castle was 6073 Knight’s Castle so the original Black Falcons shield design is the OG as far as I am concerned.

As you might have seen in my previous posts I am currently working on a large display (hopefully for Brickvention 2021 if it is accepted) exploring everything I love about the castle theme, and as part of that I am hoping to refresh and update the designs of the Black Falcons. So far I have shown my revised name and emblem and my torso designs and today I am going to post my shield designs.

I started off my design process with the iconic ‘triangle’ shaped shields, creating the three versions that I have already shown in my Knights of the Black Falcon post (designs a-c) and from there I looked at other ways to explore the shield shape but perhaps indicate some different sub-factions or units (designs d-h).

I want my units to feel related and yet have a variety of designs to feel more like a realistic army, rather than all units just carrying exactly the same shield.

Below you can see various shield variations that might be used to flesh out my units, I am envisaging that the tall (norman style) shields (I-P) will be used for different knights and that at least one of the round shields (Q-T) will be used by my crossbowmen.

So what do you think? Do the varied shield designs read enough like Black Falcons? Let me know what you think by commenting below.

My next post will be about the second faction that will feature in my display, the Forestmen.

Black Falcon torsos

Dale — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 07:56:15 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post, the Black Falcons only currently have one torso print, their original torso from 1984. This makes it incredibly limiting when you want to be able to show a range of different units. I chose to see this as a design problem that would be fun to solve, how best to take the visual style of the Black Falcons faction and implement it across various torso styles?

I began by looking through all the torso designs from the more recent castle themes (Knights Kingdom II (2004), Castle (2007), Kingdoms (2010), Castle 2013) with the aim of identifying how many torso designs each faction had and which units I would like to include in my build.

I decided on four distinct units, each with a different weapon specialisation: pikemen, crossbowmen, axemen and knights. At this stage I am unsure how I want to tackle the knights themselves, so I will come back to them in a later post, but I have so far designed suitable torsos for the other three units, which you can see below.

Pikemen

My design for the pikemen is a pretty faithful update of the original 1984 Black Falcons torso design that we all know and love. I wanted to make sure that it has a large area of blue and a maximised Knights of the Black Falcon emblem. I added a belt, a chainmail undershirt just barely visible at the collar and some slight dark blue shadow/crease detail.

Crossbowmen

My crossbowmen torso design was inspired by a Crown Knight torso, Scale Mail with Chest Strap though I have drawn my own artwork for all elements. The main thing I wanted to retain was the large buckle and strap for the quiver. I ended up creating my own scale mail pattern based on feather shapes specifically for the Black Falcons. I also wanted to bring some blue in so I have added a sash across the top that will tie in with the blue cape that the crossbowmen will wear.

Axemen

My design for the axemen was inspired by a Crown Knight torso, Scale Mail, Crown on Collar. I pretty much kept the overall design of the original but redrew all elements in my own style to make sure that they tie in well with my other torso designs, using my Black Falcons scale mail pattern and adding my Knights of the Black Falcon emblem in black.

The plan is to have my torso designs pad printed on blue torsos with black arms, just like the 1984 original.

So what do you think? Do they read as Black Falcons torsos to you? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

In my next post I will be talking about shield design, make sure you sign up to the mailing list if you would like to be notified when it is posted.

Knights of the Black Falcon

Dale — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 05:50:15 +0000

The first faction for my Castle display will be what I am calling the ‘Knights of the Black Falcon’, my own revised version of what are commonly known as ‘Black Falcon Knights’ or ‘Black Falcons’.

So I suppose the first think that people might ask is “why the name change?” and my answer to that would be that I have storytelling reasons as to the slight name change, I feel that the name “Black Falcons/Black Falcon Knights” is purely descriptive in that they have black (and silver) falcon heraldic arms. But in thinking about how to explore the faction further I did a little bit of digging and found that their current ‘name’ derives from the name of their second castle set from 1986, 6074 Black Falcon’s Fortress.

My first thoughts upon finding this out is that ‘Black Falcon’ almost could be a title of a person, maybe the lord of the castle is known as ‘The Black Falcon’. This idea set my mind going and I reasoned that this would make the faction more like the real world, making them a legion of knights aligned with a particular lord and therefore taking up his arms in battle, literally the knights of the Black Falcon.

Once I decided on the name alteration I started to look at the heraldic emblem itself. The original design is pretty iconic and I think it stands up really well today and does not really need to be refreshed or redesigned. However, I am going to do just that, because being that I am a graphic designer in my day job, I love exploring how things might evolve and change over time. Also, I really want to design new torsos and a range of shields and flags for the faction as whilst we have seen some beautiful varied castle torso, shield and flag prints over the years the poor old Black Falcons have only ever had the one design since 1984.

I started by looking at the renditions of the Black Falcon emblem that have appeared in sets between 1984 and today and found pretty much three designs, the original from 1984, a more abstracted version from the mid-2000s (I actually contemplated leaving this one out, sorry Jayko!) and the more faithful refreshed version from 10223 Kingdoms Joust (2012).

I don’t know what you think but to me the 1984 original and the 2012 Kingdoms versions are the most convincingly ‘heraldic’ of the three designs. I reckon the 2005/6 Knights Kingdom II versions look a little too modernised.

For my version I took inspiration from both the 1984 original and the 2012 Kingdoms version as there are qualities in both designs that I like.

You can see my version above, it has the stronger thicker wings of the 2012 Kingdoms version however I have completely redrawn it with more rounded/organic feather shapes. You can also see that I have drawn more realistic heraldic feet on the falcon (the other ones were a bit too chunky and geometric for me) and given it a more defined head shape (its head looked like it was all beak in the 2012 version!).

In terms of colour scheme I am sticking firmly to the original 1984 colour palette, however I will also include a version with the black and silver border like the 2012 Kingdoms version as it faithfully recalls both the original 1984 Black Falcons flag and torso emblem.

There is one other element that I am sure you have noticed, and that is of course that I have added a crown to my version. Once again this is there for purely story reasons as in my Castle build the Black Falcon has seized the throne of the kingdom.

So, what do you think? Let me know! Next up I will be showing some of my Black Falcon torso designs.