The Lego Art Series is something I’m surprised Lego hasn’t come out with sooner. I feel when Perler Beads came out and people started recreating characters and scenes from old 16-bit and 8-bit videogames somebody from Lego or at least somebody looking for an idea for a project to submit to Lego Ideas would have seen those and thought that they could have done something similar with Legos. Hell, even before Perler Beads came out I felt somebody would have come up with this idea a long time ago considering how people have been making mosaics and other art pieces out of Legos for years. Not to mention considering these are 2D art pieces we’re dealing with there’s not a whole lot of thought or engineering required to design this—just a lot of different colored Lego pieces.

I’ll have to admit, the Lego Art Series is a clever strategy to sell sets. Like most of the sets in the Technic series, a single Lego Art set could be constructed into more than one configuration. Those who are obsessive, or just plain bad at keeping their money in their pockets (like me) will buy multiples of the same set to cover all their bases.

There are currently 6 different Lego Art sets: An Iron Man set, a Sith set, a Micky Mouse set, an Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe set, a Beatles set, and a Harry Potter set. There’s also a custom Lego Mosaic Maker set which isn’t part of the Lego Art series but it’s basically the same idea. Buy the set and using a special companion app on the Lego site, it’ll generate the instructions for you to recreate whatever image you plug in. Considering how it’s not that hard to run an image through a pixilation filter and scale it to fit whatever size Lego wants to make these sets in I won’t be surprised to see more sets coming out once Lego can get the rights to whatever property they’re from.

Being the huge comic book nerd I am, when I first heard about the Lego Art sets and saw which ones they were putting out I knew I had to pick up the Marvel Studios Iron Man set and I knew I had to get three of them so I could build every configuration that was shown on the box. These configurations are: the Mark III armor from the 2008 Iron Man film, the Hulkbuster Mark I armor from Avengers: Age of Ultron, and the Mark LXXXV suit used in Avengers: Endgame. On top of that, there’s also 1 more configuration you can put together if you buy three Iron Man sets and put them together using instructions you can download from Lego.com. I was debating picking up three more sets to put together that last setup but considering how money is a bit tight right now with the whole pandemic going on, and also because I don’t have anywhere to put it or the other three Marvel Studios Iron Man sets I’m already sitting on I’ll unfortunately have to pass on that idea.

For a while I’ve been meaning to expand my skillset by getting into video production and editing, and expanding my reach with a YouTube channel. Considering how simple this set seems at a glance, I thought I would do something different, and rather than just make a post documenting the assembly like I’ve done in past Lego build posts, I thought this set would make a great subject to make a time-lapse video. I know it’s not an original idea, but it is a different way of approaching this and was something I had wanted to try for a while.

When I came up with the time-lapse video idea, I debated cheating and using a GoPro on time-lapse mode to do it. However, because I felt a GoPro on auto would result in multiple unusable shots of me caught on frame as well as lessen the impact of my video by not capturing enough of the build process, I instead decided to go with putting my SLR camera on a tripod and getting a picture of every single piece being added to the build, an idea which I regretted about 3 hours into putting this together.

Like I said earlier, at a glance this set seems pretty simple, but given the sheer number of pieces involved, it was quite a hellish experience to photograph every piece. I honestly should have figured this out just by looking at the box. At a glance the box tells you that the set is 3,167 pieces, and while most of those are extra 1×1 flat colored round plates that you need to make all 3 different configurations, you’re still using about 75% of the pieces inside the box. If you look at the picture on the box, the canvas the mosaic is built on is 48×48 studs which translates to 2,304 different 1×1 round plates needed just for the actual picture. Add into the fact that the canvas isn’t one piece and needs to be assembled and reinforced you’re looking at another 200 pieces. In the end I took 2,491 pictures while assembling this set not including shots that had to be redone, either because I messed up somewhere on the instructions and had to fix it or because I was working on this by a window in my parents’ living room and the sun had shifted so I needed to change the camera settings to compensate. Working by that window also complicated things because it meant I could only work on this a few hours a day because I was trying to make sure my pictures looked as consistent as possible, which made this project which I thought would only take a day or 2, take almost a week to finish.

Since I’m also OCD and desperate to make sure all the pictures looked as consistent as possible, I spent a few more days in Photoshop making sure they all looked similar, adjusting brightness and contrast, temperature, and cloning out stray corgi hairs or other blemishes that ended up on the table. While my photos may not be 100% consistent due to the fact I nudged the pieces a little every once in a while as well as not being able to color correct all of them properly I thought the end result didn’t look that bad considering how this was my first time doing a time-lapse video.

Even though this is a rather simple set I still felt I could still generate a write up detailing my experience building it. If you’re just here for the video I’ll give it to you right now. If you’re still willing to read what I have to write then just go ahead and feel free to continue scrolling down as I give you my experience building the Mark III Iron Man using the Lego Art Marvel Studios Iron Man Set.

Here’s the front of the box. The picture featured on the front is the Mark LXXXV suit from Avengers: Endgame. I’m assuming they chose to put that 1 on the box because it’s the most recent armor.

Back of the box. I feel that main image at the top is very reminiscent of like an Ikea ad and was intentionally chosen to emphasize the fact that this isn’t a toy for children, but an art piece for adults to put on display.

Here’s the 3 different versions you can build with this set. As I said earlier you can do either the Mark III Iron Man, the Mark I Hulkbuster armor, or the Mark LXXXV (85th). I’m a bit annoyed that they didn’t tell you right off the bat that if you bought three of these sets you could combine them to make an entirely different mural. The only reason I found about it is because I heard about it on a forum somewhere. I have to chalk this up to the whole Easter Egg culture we’re currently living where companies are constantly hiding some secret about their products and letting people discover it for themselves.

Here’s you see when you open the box. Despite the fact there’s over 3,000 different pieces in this set there’s only 35 unique pieces. As expected most of those pieces are those tiny little flat round plates.

The reason why I decided to build the Mark III first is because despite the fact the Mark LXXXV is on the box, the Mark III is the first configuration in the instruction manual. Thumbing through the rest of the manual it looks like the instructions were based on chronological order.

Here’s the first piece for the canvas, a 4/3 16×16 with 4.85 holes When Lego first announced the Lego Art sets I assumed the canvas you built them on were 1 big giant piece so I was surprised when I opened this and discovered you actually have to build the canvas. I’m assuming the reason why Lego did this is because this is an existing piece that they already produce and it was easier just to give their customers this and a few pegs rather than get their machinery setup to crank out 48×48 bricks.

Here’s the first mosaic of the first row completed.

The second.

The third.

Here are those pieces all put together.

The first mosaic of the second row.

Second mosaic.

Third mosaic.

Second row put all together.

First part of the third row.

Second piece.

The final piece put together. That little Iron Man plate is an optional piece. If you want you don’t have to include it. Instead you can just fill it in with a few more 1×1 flat round colored plates.

Here’s the third row put together.

And here all the canvases all put together. Even though the mosaic is done this set is far from completed. In case you haven’t been paying attention the entire thing is held together by a few friction connector pegs so it is really flimsy. In fact it actually came apart a few times when I picked it up like this.

The next 200 pieces or so are dedicated to building a frame as well as reinforcing the canvases so it won’t fall apart so easy.

You also build these things which are the wall hangers. Lego really doesn’t make things easy for you.

And here’s the completed piece.

And there it is, my first Lego Art piece fully assembled and my first attempt at doing a Lego time-lapse movie. I’m hoping to do more time-lapse/stop-motion movies in the future, however since they are so time-consuming I’ll probably only do them for sets that are around 1,000-1,200 pieces as well as future Lego Art sets since there’s really not that much to them.

Thanks for checking this out and don’t forget to come back for more.