Autumn is a lovely season–so many bright colors! I had fun with some new(ish) bright yellow leaves to create a bright autumn waterwheel scene!
Usually I take work in progress pictures just to show the progress to other people–but sometimes, these kind of pictures are an important part of the building process, so I know what will show up in the final frame. This was one of those times! I knew I wanted a 16:9 aspect ratio, so I set my camera to shoot at that size and took a picture to see how wide my base needed to be.
On kind of unusual choice I made early on was to keep the front and back halves of the creation separate. This gave me more flexibility (literally!) for the final shot.
As I started adding trees, taking work in progress pictures became even more important. Based on the above picture, I decided that the yellow leaves should be farther back. And I also took the bridge out–the truth is, I love my water too much to hide it away under a log bridge!
That was one of my last progress shots–I spotted the gaps I had to fill in on the left and right, added some trees, and built the mill house. Then the entire build–four separate sections–moved outside for the photoshoot.
As you can see, there are quite a host of leaves in this build. If you’ve ever built with a lot of leaves, you know they’re super fiddly. I rebuilt the front trees several times after knocking them over!
From a high angle, you can’t hardly see the mill at all! You also get a view of that unsightly gap between the two slices of the build.
This little bit of forest looked better higher up, so I tucked a couple pieces of broken ceramic under the bricks to prop it up.
The mill roof is pretty complex, and the connections around back get a little wild!
As you can see from this low angle, there’s a lot going on with that roof. The front A was definitely the hardest part of this build!
The waterwheel itself is made of about 20 1×1 brown plates and a few 1×1 brown clips. These actually stick together fairly well and it only took a couple tries to get the entire wheel to come together. I think four of these would make fun wheels for an old fashioned wagon or something!
After some editing (including compositing two pictures so neither the trees nor the mill would be terribly out of focus), I ended up with this 16:9 image.
Then, I added an autumn themed frame to spice it up a little, and voila!
This creation is part of a collaboration for the Summer Joust. The other parts feature the watermill in Spring, Summer, and Winter!
Enjoyed this build log? Check out these others:
Geneva D 
What do you think?