Years of Peace

 

This is my entry for Summer Joust 2026, category: Moments of Happiness. What a great category! I made this during the last days of my summer holidays. After it, returning to work was almost relaxing... Anyway, I sketched this to my sketchbook in a tram on a way for buying some Lundia shelves. The final model follows the sketch quite closely, except that I added the cat and the fruit tray. Using bright light blue wedge slopes as the dress was part of the original plan, though I also played with the idea of using my beloved trans-clear opal 1x1 round tiles there. For once, the figure is intended to be seen from the back, so I put extra effort to the back and the bun. The hair was actually one of the last things I built for this.

This is inspired by several sources. First, my summer trip to Tallinn, which enchanted me with its very well preserved medieval town walls and its towers. The walkway on the wall is directly inspired by Tallinn's battlements which I visited. Secondly, there's more than bit of the view from my own home. My other window displays the Tampere cathedral, and although it is not medieval (it's built 1902-1907) it is inspired by medieval architecture and has a similar combination of grey stone and red tiled roof as the towers here. The other window displays a fantastic, layered and varying selection of low and tall buildings from the 20th century, as well as several trees among them. There's a bit of that here, too.

The cat is inspired by our cat Elsku-Maumau. I'm fond of Mauski and Mauski is fond of me. It this model, the cat looks dissapointed as they tray has only fresh fruits and no cat food at all.

The other buildings on the background are loosely inspired by Tallinn's guild houses, though there is also influences of vernacular Italian houses in there. I've been wanting to use dark green Pridak feet from Karzahni as cypresses for a long time, and this was the perfect opportunity. There's a bit of a closer roof visible in the bottom right, as I wanted to position the balcony above the town; I think the view has some influences from the Prague castle, which has a fantastic view over the endless tiled roofs. Most of the gaps, however, I filled with trees. Their mix of different greens is reflected in the larger leaves framing the upper part of the scene.

I obviously have only one photo of this, but here's a behind-the-scenes video of my set-up, featuring BURPs and LURPs I recently reclaimed from my parent's house. The video is unfortunately sideways as I have some issues with my video editing software (as Microsoft wants to do this in cloud). I might fix it later. Now I only have to find out how to display this at home and, possibly, in some exhibits. 

- Eero.