How to plant a plastic tree

Yesterday Sheo. revealed this tutorial for building an excellent microscale tree. It uses only 19 pieces, yet the end result looks amazing:

It looks unstable, but the builder says it can be tipped upside down without any pieces falling off. The natural, round shaping and fine details are incredible at this scale - microscale nature/architecture MOCs will no doubt be enhanced by the presence of a few of these trees, modified to your needs. Here's Sheo's own example, a stately chapel: 

The builder shows off a knowledge of nice part uses, including the ski pole, spinning-plate base, and - my favorite - the reversed jumper plates for doors. 

Now that you know how to build these trees, your microscale MOCs can be further enhanced...if you use this idea be sure to leave a comment on Sheo's post to let your appreciation be known!

Three building tricks from umamen

One thing this blog hasn't covered very much is building techniques. Flickr user umamen (whose General Grievous figure we recently blogged) has recently posted a trio of useful building tricks that I think the rest of us would benefit from seeing. 

First off, here's how to make a "rounded cube" or "ball" using a little SNOT and some nice use of flower elements: 

Next, here's a simple yet effective angling technique using the new(ish) skeleton arms: 

umamen has put both the above techniques to good use in this little robot:

Finally, this is probably the technique that the most of our readers already know about, but it's a great one to know if you don't already. If you separate the two parts of LEGO's lever/joystick element, you can stick the skinny part inside a 1x2 grille tile, which has several useful applications, as seen here:

We'll try to feature a bit more "building tips and tricks" content here on The Brick Bucket, even just by pointing out interesting ones we see in MOCs we blog.