Forced perspective techniques create optical illusions by playing with scale—so when you’re building with LEGO bricks, forced perspective is a great technique for turning less into more! With this build Fractured Kingdoms: The Siege, Armon Russ (Flickr | Instagram) built a lovely microscale city and then made the city look huge by placing a couple of minifigures in the foreground.

One of the things that makes the forced perspective so effective in this creation is the color change from the foreground to the background. The dark tan in front is all in sharp focus, giving the impression of being closeup, while the plain behind is light nougat, and clearly much farther away.

The illusion of forced perspective works best if the largest elements in the scene are in focus—which sometimes means that a lot of clever LEGO building gets blurred out. In this case, I have to highlight the nice use of Technic gears and colored balls as domes!

This creation isn’t built with real bricks—it’s all digital, although it’s rendered so well you can hardly tell!

I wanted to hear a bit more about that process and the story behind the build, so I asked Armon a few questions.

Geneva: This build obviously has a lot of backstory behind it—it's a fascinating elevated city with a staircase going up to it. Can you give us a quick summary of the world this takes place in?

Armon: This build is set in the RPG fantasy world of Fractured Kingdoms (I’m one of the founders). The setting is a continent with four kingdoms divided by a mountain border that was raised by sorcerers a hundred years ago. My build “The Siege” features Sumarr, one of the cities of Kader (the desert kingdom). If you want even more information, you could pop into our Discord server and scroll through the #about channel.

Geneva: I've built a fair amount digitally myself, and achieving realistic, non-repetitive texture is always a time-consuming challenge. I'm impressed with how well textured your creation is. How long did this build take you?

Armon: It took me a while to finish because I built it off and on over the course of about a month, but I didn’t spend a lot of actual time building it. I’m super familiar with Stud.io’s interface so I can build pretty fast if I need to (and the copy/paste function was integral to making the brick-built background and surrounding landscape very quickly).

Geneva: Speaking of building digitally, your renders look so real! What's your secret?

Armon: For my renders, I use Blender (with a Mecabricks add-on I paid for) and import the model from Mecabricks (after importing it there from Stud.io).

Geneva: Thanks for the answers, Armon! I’m looking forward to your next creation!

You probably noticed Armon mention Fractured Kingdoms. I knew Fractured Kingdoms is a castle RPG, but I didn’t know much else about it, so I figured this was my opportunity to spend some time trailing rabbits in Discord and feel good about it.

The Fractured Kingdom’s Logo, featuring Isloriel’s Unicorn, Alborne’s Lion, Kader’s Skull, and Melikroth’s Eagle

The Fractured Kingdoms story starts with a tyrannical ruler who almost crushed the world of the kingdoms. Just in time, the earth revolted and earthquakes divided the land into four kingdoms. After a century of development, these four kingdoms are ready to interact once more.

Some of Armon’s other builds for Fractured Kingdoms are arguably more impressive than this one—I picked three of my favorites for you to scroll through.

City of Atrocity

The Bounty

Searching Sumarr

You can enjoy even more of Armon Russ’s creations on Flickr or Instagram.

When was the last time you tried out some forced perspective techniques? Is losing half a build to a blurry background worth the sense of immersion? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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