This is my presentation of a little urban vignette, "Scenes from Studs Street." Looking at this image, you may notice the interesting uses of that silver goblet I had to implement during my second round in the ABS Builder Challenge. This is no accident: the seed of this whole build was utilizing those goblets as flowerpots. It was my desire to publish this creation for the ABS Challenge as one of my entries; however, as urgent commission work sprang up midway through the contest, I ran out of time to finish this scene by the deadline.
Anyway, in terms of process: the flowerpots came first; then came the idea of making a florist's shop. This of course reminded me of an earlier of my ABS builds with flowers, so I decided I might make a modern parallel to that 19th century vignette. Wanting to avoid too much similarity, though, the germ of that idea quickly grew into making a full-fledged street scene, complete with a diverse set of characters.
My original goal was to present a larger, more intricate street— in fact, I envisioned an entirely brick-built image where a street, a sidewalk, and the facades of buildings would occupy all the visible space in the finished photo. It would have been my first time putting together such an immersive, LEGO®-filled scene.
However, as the deadline for the ABS Challenge passed, so did the drive that comes with competition; as parts of the design began to feel laborious to me, I lost my interest in making a "show-stopping" build (i.e., that which I hoped to achieve with an immersive scene), and so the premise of completing the piece as I'd originally intended lost most of its appeal. By this point, I had built a satisfactory street, complete with traffic and crosswalk lines, and a raised sidewalk I was pretty happy with; it was the facades of the buildings that weren't shaping up how I wanted, especially the one behind the florist's booth, which looked too modern/corporate to me, and didn't fit stylistically with the quaint atmosphere I was going for.
So, rather than letting the parts of the scene I liked—namely, the characters, floral booth, and streetlights—fall by the wayside, I opted to present them alone, in the style of my previous figbarfs.
I spent a good deal of time fiddling with various minifigure combinations until I was happy with the cast of characters you see. The policeman and guitarist were latecomers to the scene, some of the last sub-assemblies I made before I started sharing teasers on my Instagram. The businessman's bench, the trashcan, and the crosswalk signal also manifested pretty late, just in time for photography.