A couple of months ago, I put together the 31201 LEGO Art Harry Potter Hogwarts Crests (HPHC) mosaic, and I felt a little underwhelmed. But I think this was more a ‘me thing’ rather than an issue with the set: I personally didn’t feel a strong affinity with the source material, not really identifying with any particular Hogwarts House. I have heard from plenty of people who really enjoy the build, and want to build the set of crests, as well as the larger combination crest. So, as I said, it’s a Me thing. Perhaps I should have looked at a crest other than Hufflepuff’s?

That said, one positive point that I do appreciate is a large number of left over parts.

Of course, one of the stated goals for the LEGO ART range is not just to produce a mosaic which you could hang on your wall, but to also give adults an activity to focus on. You don’t need to hang your final result. you can dismantle it, and rebuild it as one of the other options, or even rebuild it as another image.

Despite personally feeling a little deflated by the HPHC building experience, I find the idea of building a LEGO Mosaic/Art set appealing. If you have followed my posts around the time of the range being announced, you will have seen my analysis of the value for money building the LEGO Art Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, either through the set or purchasing the individual elements (Spoiler – they sets are good value for the elements you receive).

I’ll have to admit, the notion of a mass marketed LEGO Set based on the mass produced screen print of Marilyn Monroe amuses me as a further extension of the pop-art movement. So, I thought I would set out to investigate whether I could rebuild the Hogwarts Crest as Marilyn. Therefore using a mass produced LEGO Artwork to produce a different mass produced artwork. Now, along with virtually all Building instructions, you can download them from the LEGO customer support website, OR you can access them from Building Instructions App.

Warhol produced three portfolios of 10 screenprints, all using different colour combinations. Plainly, there was no one ‘right version’ This strikes me as something just crying out for exploration through the LEGO Art sets.

So…Looking back at the Marilyn set, the different areas of colour blocks appeared to be something along the lines of:

Color Block	Elements used per block (Counted from instructions)	Colour count, based on the Brickset inventory Applied to the above variant (note, there will be spares included in the pack!)
Black (1)	630	629
Dark Stone Grey (2)	131	131
Background/eye liner (6)	430	587 (Light Purple)
Face (5)	587	587 (Bright Yellow)
Hair (4)	480	587 (Medium Azur)
Light shadow/lips (7)	46	46 (Bright Reddish Violet)

Harry Potter: Inventory as reported at Brickset.com

• 

• 

• Black 593
• Silver Metallic 630
• Warm Gold 604
• Dark Red 503
• Bright Blue 431
• Green 499
• White 369
• Medium stone grey 236
• Titanium Metallic 153
• Bright red 15
• Medium azur 10
• Bright yellowish Green 4

So, the HPHC appears to have enough elements to enough elements, perhaps a little short on black – but I have plenty in my collection, should I require them to complete the mosaic.

The 131 Dark stone grey tiles providing definition to some of the shadows: they could readily be replaced by titanium metallic studs in HPHC

Considering the recolour.

The face is the next parts intensive aspect of the Monroe print requiring 587 elements: it would appear that HPHC has sufficient warm gold, black or metallic silver studs to fill this aspect.

The hair requires 480 pieces, and as such, could be coloured dark red, silver, green or gold.

The background/ eyeliner requires around 430 parts, so blue could be an option here, along with any colours not previously used with the face and hair.

Lips and the smaller area of shade could be with any of the remaining elements in any colour: White white or medium stone grey could be an option, along with other colour not used in the previous steps.

My Personal Choice:

In the first instance, I was most interested in preserving the blonde hair. This probably tied my hands and forced me to use metallic silver for her face. I filled in the black dots, and was pleasantly surprised to see that I did not require any additional black studs to complete the spaces, despite the inventory suggesting that I might need to raid my collection of small parts.

I also initially experimented with medium stone grey as the background as well as white for the lips: this was not as effective as I had hoped it might be. Which is useful – I didn’t realise at the time that I was likely to run out of the medium stone grey part way into the other side of the background.

So, I decided to change the lips to dark red: from here it was a matter of deciding on blue or green as a background/ eyelid colour. Using green, in conjuction with the dark red of the shadows and lips left me wondering if it might begin to look a lot like Christmas. And so I chose blue. As some medium azur is also present in the set, I decided to add a couple of random highlights to Marilyn’s eyes.

Add so we had the following final colour map:

Region	Colour
Shadows	Black
Face	Metallic Silver
Hair	Warm Gold
Background / Eyelids	Bright Blue
Line Definition / Shadow Definition	Metallic Titanium
Lips / Shadow Definition	New Dark Red

Once I finished the laying of studs, we had a result like this one:

So I added the frame. Here is the final piece, with the left over elements. I am yet to open the bags of green, and there were no white or medium grey elements used. I used up the bulk of the blue, with only a couple of studs left over. It would appear that I made a reasonable calculations while considering the part counts, and I do appreciate the fact that there were sufficient black elements to fill in the shadows, without entering my personal supply. I wonder if this was a deliberate choice in the manufacture of the Hogwarts Crest Set?

I could have used bright red for the lips, BUT there are only just enough of that element in the set to fill the lips, and the other areas in that region I would have then needed to use another colour for the other areas of trim. So I opted for the dark red. It seemed to fit.

Now, is this the only option to try?

Black and stone grey are consistent in the original Marilyn LEGO Art sets, but we know that Warhol himself made a large number of varations on this, and that occasionally, a brighter colour might be used for the black park of the image.

So: Options for Shadows (Black, Silver, gold) – Options for face: 2 remaining – Options for hair: 1 of those original 3 remaining plus dark red. This gives enough elements to put together 12 variations on these main colour areas only.

So, if you are more interested in the art of building and rebuilding, as a mindfullness exercise, rather than creating a picture to hang up on your wall, there are plenty of options available here – even after you have built and dismantled the 4 Hogwarts Crests.

Overall, I found this recolouring of the Harry Potter Howarts Crests to be an interesting exercise, and perhaps more satisfying that simply painting by numbers. I was quite excited to find that it was possible to generate a recoloured version of the Warhol Marilyn Monroe Screen Print, using the Hogwarts Crests set. It opens up a world of possibilities if you are interested in building as a mindfullness exercise, but do not feel the need to adapt your adapt an image of your own creation to the mosaic process, but merely to adapt the instructions of another set.

I personally enjoyed the final result, as well as the process to reach it. What do you think? How would you colour Marilyn? Why dont you leave your comments below, and until next time,

Play Well!

The 31201 LEGO® ART Harry Potter Hogwarts Crests set was provided by the LEGO Group for review purposes. As you can see, I found an alternative use for it. All opinions are my own.

As I mentioned last week, Facebook is currently blocking Australians access to what it perceives to be ‘News’. This includes blocking Australian Facebook ‘News’ pages, which currently includes the Facebook pages of ramblingbrick, Jay’s Brick Blog, Bricktastic Blog, Cheep Jokes , BlockWarts and Bricking Around. They took out a few health authorities, as well as emergency services, crisis refuges, community groups and small businesses while they were at it!

Anyway, while Facebook and the Australian government are trying to settle their differences, there remains the little issue that some of these sites even have their web URLs blocked from facebook. Wherever in the world you are, you might find your news feed is missing some of your favorite sites. Somehow, Rambling Brick’s Facebook page is considered to be news, but ramblingbrick.com is not. For Now. Please sign up for our mailing lists, or follow us on another form of social media, such as Twitter, to ensure you catch all the great Australian LEGO® Fan content. An appeals process will open this week, but I suspect it will be a slow process.

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