So it begins ... Lego Art WIP

Ten days ago, I told you about my Lego "collection" whose pieces so far all have been gifts (so far because I found out about a minor, but really dumb mistake which required immediate retail therapy, so I bought Lego for myself for the first time). 

In that post, I mentioned my Lego Art set of "The Beatles" and how I've had it around for a few years because I couldn't even decide which Beatle to make. Well, on the day the post went live, I chose George because I just liked his picture best.

What even is Lego Art?
According to Wikipedia which has a load of quotes for articles on the topic, the theme was introduced in 2020 (which I think was also the year my friend gave me my set in order to make self-isolating easier, but being used to working on Lego projects together with him, I didn't see the appeal at the time).
The product line started with four mosaics, one of them "The Beatles", and didn't use 3D bricks, but 2D 1x1 studs. Later items also featured bigger tiles.

The sets depict iconic personalities or art, for example Warhol's Marilyn Monroe or Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.
During our Crafternoon - a Zoom meeting of bloggers coming together to chat and craft - I started working on the first square.
There are nine squares and fifteen different colors of studs and also tiles for the "frame".
The squares get attached to each other to form the whole picture.

Now I had to make another decision about how to work on the squares. Should I do one color after the other which means I would have to concentrate on counting or should I lay out all the colors I need for a square and do it spot by spot either horizontally or vertically?

As most of the first square was just black and dark grey, I went for the counting. I did the grey first, then filled up the gaps with black and did the few colors in the end.
I don't know yet if that will be a good idea once there are more colors on a square. If I had enough empty bead cups, I could set them all up like beads for beading or bead looming. Or I could use a bead tray if I had one, but that's not how I bead. We'll see.

Usually, when I started something like this, I kept going until I had finished. My pal and I spent hours chatting, laughing, and bricking, but these days I simply can't sit for that long anymore.
Ponder and later Gundel loved to help out.

Just checking if you left some of the bricks in
the shipping box.

Let me sort this out for you, Mom,
before I lose any interest at all forever.

During Crafternoon, I found out that der Dekan does NOT make a good Lego helper. The studs were too tempting and I'm too old to crawl around on the floor and look for little colored dots everywhere. Not only did he go for the ones I had taken out of the bags - very few at a time because I had expected that - but he also tried to rip out the studs on the plate, both with claws and teeth!
Possibly it would have helped to have my pal around because der Dekan is strictly a family guy meaning he usually retreats to the top of the wardrobe if non-family comes around.
My goal was to make one square a day, at least on the weekend. Yeah, that didn't happen. I finished the first one during Crafternoon on a Saturday and the next one on the Thursday after that.

Well, and now it's Tuesday and this is as far as I have come until Sunday afternoon (of course I'll have to take the one square off again because I have to finish the whole row so I can attach it).
And der Dekan helped after all. We found a way. The next time we didn't. Then we did again, but in the end he fell off the table because he had rolled around in the open lid of the box too wildly. We'll keep working on it.

I am not affiliated with Lego in any way, except playing with it every, now and then.

Random Saturday - To brick or not to brick

Lego was the topic of another random Saturday seven years ago, but back then I only spoke about and showed my London bus.

You've also seen a picture of my Lego Snowglobe as part of my hallway Christmas decoration.

There's more. Not much. Lego is and always has been very much a matter of money and space both of which I prefer to spend on other things, no matter how tempting some of the projects may look like (I'm just saying cat).
There are stories, however. Of course there are, after all this is random Saturday. Old ones, new ones.

I couldn't tell you the exact age at which I got my first Legos. Back then, all of us siblings got one basic set which consisted of one baseplate - still the thicker ones then - and a bunch of bricks. We threw everything together in order to have more options for bigger projects. Basic set also meant basic bricks which we named after the number of bumps on each one (no idea if that was some official naming, but we added the Swabian diminutive -le to the numbers, so maybe not).
What I remember best was building tiny house models with limited wall height and no roof, tiny because the baseplates were small and because we didn't have that many bricks. Also no roof meant we could play in them by using the smallest bricks for the people living in the house.

Years later, my little brother had five boxes (four of them had been a lottery prize, size A to D) of Märklin's (the company is known among model train collectors and is located in my town) own brick version - the so-called Minex bricks (Märklin used the name Minex for several products, also metal construction sets or trains). You could do a lot with five boxes and the bricks were much easier to take apart which could be both an advantage and a disadvantage, but I remember having a lot of fun with those.

Afterwards, bricking (as I've heard it being called in Germany) wasn't really a topic for me anymore for many years - until one year my pal gave me the Yellow Submarine from the Beatles movie to cheer me up in a weltschmerz phase.
We spent a few evenings both working on our projects, having something to eat and drink, laughing a lot, always under the strict supervision of Ponder.
It was a lot of fun although it's amazing how many mistakes you can make on a piece that doesn't even look that difficult on the outside.

For my next birthday, he gave me the London Bus.
That really brought back memories of my first London visit (unfortunately there were only two) together with a friend and her five year old daughter. On the first day, we did bus hopping, randomly changing buses seeing where they would take us.

Again we started to work on our projects together, but then life happened and we finished them on our own. That's when I found that I wasn't made to be a lonely bricker. I gave up eventually and had to motivate myself hard to finally pick it up again. That's why it took me five months to get it finished! It's so cool.

Two more projects we did together again was the living room from The Big Bang Theory and the Santa Snowglobe (the weirdest snowglobe ever) which had been an extra gift with an order.

There's one more piece that has been waiting for me to work on it. It has been around for several years and I think it's really time to get started on it - the Lego Art set "The Beatles". With the box content you can make one of the four portraits and my first problem was to decide which one to make because, let's get this clear, if I make one I'm not going to rip it out again to make a different one.
To be honest, I wish the portraits were old black and white ones, but that can't be helped, can it?

Once I decide, I might turn this project into small WIP posts to motivate myself, so I won't give it up.
Which portrait would you choose IF you like The Beatles at all?

I am not affiliated with Lego in any way, except playing with it every, now and then.