Keep Venture
This page contains my lego fan art of Keep Venture from Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. That is the first volume in the Mistborn series. The Mistborn series currently contains six novels and three shorter stories, and it is part of Sanderson's Cosmere universe. Brandon Sanderson's official introduction to the first book in the series can be found here, along with sample chapters, annotations, deleted scenes, and some official artwork.
Spoiler warning: this album has minor spoilers for Mistborn: The Final Empire. I personally think the potential spoilers are rather mild, but if you have not completed the book, proceed at your own risk.
You can view the files either through the gallery below or the individual image links just below the gallery. Below that, I have included a discussion of the build and some of the customization involved, followed by copyright and use information. If you're on mobile, the menus are at the bottom of the page.
Gallery
Individual image links
- Outside view
- Outside view (side)
- Vin's carriage arrives
- Keep Venture facade
- Rose window
- Vin and Sazed enter the keep
- Dancers
- Straff Venture's platform
- Clock over the dance floor
- Mural on the dance floor
- Stained glass windows
- Vin and Sazed
- Orchestra
- Lounge
- Elend in his nook
- Vin and Elend
- Assassins
About this build
In one of his annotations (warning: spoilers for Hero of Ages), Brandon says that the architecture of Keep Venture is based off of the Washington National Cathedral. I did my best to mimic that on the Keep's exterior, with a few modest changes due to running out of grey bricks and table space. The build itself was tricky because I had to allow for large portions of the walls and roof to be removed for photography, without disturbing the interior wiring used for the lighting. That is why you only see interior lighting on one side of the main hall above the dance floor -- the wall on the other side was occasionally removed.
The stained glass techniques, such as the rose windows and the large rectangle windows built out of mesh fences, are not my own inventions. There are quite a few awesome lego cathedral builds out there, and I borrowed what looked like it would work best here.
The photography of the Keep's exterior was particularly painful, as the LED lighting isn't nearly as bright as it looks. I had to turn off all the other lights in my studio then use a thirty-second exposure. For each adjustment of focus or angle, I had to turn the lights back on. I probably spent several hours just to get the six exterior photographs shown here. A professional photographer would probably manage that much more easily, but I haven't had any formal training in any aspect of this work, so I'm mostly muddling through.
Legal stuff
The artwork on this page is copyright 2017 by Richard Martin. The source material is copyright by Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC (Brandon Sanderson's company).
Feel free to download the images in this gallery and to use them for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to re-post them online, you may do so as long as you give me credit by either citing me (Rick Martin) as the artist, linking to this site, and/or linking to my Facebook page.
I am not affiliated with Brandon Sanderson or Dragonsteel Entertainment in any way. This page is in compliance with Brandon Sanderson's official policy on fan art.