As we face a winter when staying home is still the safest way to spend time, I’m sure we are all looking for new at-home activities to keep ourselves busy. And you’ll find a great one in LEGO’s new LEGO Art series.
A variation on the LEGO Dots kids’ sets, LEGO Art is designed for adult builders. Each set comes with hundreds of colorful dots and instructions on how to arrange them to create a variety of pop culture-inspired images within a LEGO frame. Once completed, these LEGO builds function as very cool wall art.
I personally built the “Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe” set, which was one of the sets that LEGO released in its original LEGO Art lineup (along with Iron Man, Star Wars, and The Beatles designs).
Before settling in to begin your LEGO Art construction, you have to choose which image you want to appear on your finished art piece. Each set comes with enough dots to complete at least three different images, but obviously only one can be on the canvas at a time. (Or, if you buy multiple LEGO Art sets, you can combine them to create an even larger image!) In the case of this Warhol set, there are four image options, each a different color variation of the iconic Marilyn Monroe print. The instruction book comes with a key that tells you which page to turn to for your desired image, and then the building can get started!
When I started building this set, I immediately remembered a LEGO set I built with my mother about two decades ago. We sent my kindergarten school photo to LEGO, then received a LEGO kit in the mail with the materials to create a greyscale version of my face out of square LEGO studs. It was called “LEGO Mosaic,” and I bring it up now not only as a fun anecdote, but also to commend LEGO for how much LEGO Art improves upon this already-interesting concept.
First off, using dots instead of square pieces to create the image provided — at least in my opinion— a cleaner and clearer image. But the true winning aspect of LEGO Art is the process for building the canvas itself. In my LEGO Mosaic set, we received one large, thin LEGO sheet that served as the canvas/backdrop for the image. In the LEGO Art set, the canvas is broken down into nine thick, smaller squares that you later assemble to create the full image. I believe this is preferable in many ways, most notably because the project is much easier to manage —and to pause — when it’s in these smaller chunks. I found myself sitting down to complete one or two squares of the image each night, which made the building experience last much longer.
When actually putting together each section of the LEGO Art image, you get a corresponding image of that section in the instruction book, drawn to scale. In the instructions, the correct color for each dot is indicated by its printed color and by a number in the circle that corresponds to the color.
