Castle In The Sky

Purple-loving musician Prince once sang, "This is what it sounds like when doves cry" – but he didn't actually tell us what it sounds like when doves cry. But I did my research, and it's a sort of... hooooAHHH, hoo-hoo!

Now that you've learned a fun new fact about doves, and began to question whether Prince knew what he was talking about at all, let me welcome you to today's beautiful avian build: A White Dove Castle, by Megatorious, aka Victor Krantz, aka someone who knows more than Prince about the Columbidae family. And he'd have to, because A White Dove Castle is a huge, gorgeous piece featuring a bird in flight – but look closer, and you'll see that the bird is also a castle. Actually, the title probably gave that bit away, didn't it? 

Our lovely bird friend is full of little details to appreciate, from the wisteria clinging to vines that delicately drape from below, to the lantern that the bird is clutching in its talons. Though these details raise questions, like "how on earth do they water those wisteria," and "what does a bird need a lantern for," I'm happy to just sit back and enjoy the nice art.

But how on earth did Megatorious come up with the idea of a castle built inside a bird? "I felt that I wanted to do something else for a change," he says. The idea came late on a Friday evening after a tough few weeks at school, and Mega wanted to take his mind off work – "which is why I decided to hop on Minecraft and let the creativity roam freely." 

His main point of inspiration was the ruins at Petra, which are both built out of and built into the rocks around them. You might know Petra from the Al-Khazneh, an impressively elaborate temple carved into a sandstone cliff. Mega took the idea of building into something, and simply changed "temple" into "castle", and "stone cliff" into... "bird"! 

From there, it was simply a matter of letting the bricks speak to him. "I mainly resorted to using white blocks," says Mega. "There wasn't really a choice here, since I wanted to recreate a dove, and they're naturally white!" But worry not – the castle isn't made of bird. How do we know? There aren't Bird Blocks in Minecraft. Yet.

"Choosing to do a white castle on a white bird proved to be more difficult than I first imagined," Mega admits. "I struggled to make the castle recognizable and really pop like I wanted it to. To solve this, I had to play around with different shades of white, and use darker whites such as diorite for shadows and brighter whites like snow for highlights." This is what it sounds like when doves... melt?

Mega is far from a first-time builder, of course, He has been playing Minecraft for almost ten years, in fact: "I was introduced to Minecraft through a friend back in 2012," he says, "and I instantly fell in love with the building aspect." Since that day, he's been building bigger and bigger things, including some that we've featured on this here website, and a veritable cornucopia on Planet Minecraft.  

Although A White Dove Castle and many of his other works were solo projects, Mega is also a member of prestigious building team Blockworks, who you may remember from Minecraft's official Ten Year Anniversary Map. As part of the team, Megatorious worked on The Uncensored Library, a digital library that contains works from banned writers, journalists, topics, and even countries. "What really makes me proud... is the way that we managed to utilize Minecraft as a tool to address such an important topic as press censorship," he says.

But Megatorious hopes that he can make a difference in his solo builds, too. "I hope people like it," he says of his White Dove Castle. "My goal is to always evolve and create something better." He stresses that "better doesn’t necessarily mean bigger," though – the dove is by no means his biggest build, but the details and quality are what make it special. "I hope the build can motivate and inspire people," he says. "Hopefully, building something like this doesn’t seem unreachable." 

 
Render by Paul Sireau.