LEGO Art 31215 Vincent Van Gogh Sunflowers – And it was all yellow [Review]
The LEGO Art theme promises to give builders a deeper appreciation of great works through the guided creation of their own replica masterpieces. Van Gogh’s Starry Night started as an Ideas project and was soon followed by The Great Wave of Kanagawa by Hokusai and DaVinci’s Mona Lisa. For the fourth painting to get the brick treatment, LEGO returns to the Dutch Impressionist Vincent van Gogh with 31215 Sunflowers. Containing 2,615 pieces, it’s the largest LEGO painting in the Art line, and one that the LEGO Company worked closely on with the Van Gogh Museum for maximum authenticity. You can acquire your own copy of this iconic work starting on March 1st for US $199.99 | CAN $259.99 | UK £169.99. Is it time to invest in a second Van Gogh for your collection? Let’s have a look!
The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
Unboxing and instructions
The set comes in a large rectangular black box with an all-new greeble strip along the bottom for the Art line, which includes palettes and brushes amongst the monochrome bricks. The set title receives a custom graphic treatment and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam gets a credit, not unlike MoMA branding on Starry Night.
Cutting the tape allows the lid to slide off revealing an inner box, numbered plastic bags, a brick separator in bag 1, and a paper envelope containing the instructions. All told there are 34 numbered plastic bags and 4 unnumbered bags containing large grey plates and four brown flex tubes (two for use and a spare pair). Inside the paper bag is a single square-bound instruction book and no stickers.
As is common with many LEGO 18+ sets, the instruction booklet includes several pages about the subject and design process of the set. Curiously, the set’s lead LEGO designer (Stijn Oom) isn’t credited here, rather extra attention is paid to the experts at the Van Gogh museum for their cooperation in ensuring accuracy. To hear from Stijn about the collaboration, our friends at New Elementary have a great summary of the set’s reveal at the Fan Media Days event.
The build
As is now standard with painting sets in the Art line, we start by building the frame. Due to the large size, the outer frame uses 6 bags. The brick yellow (tan) frame comes together one corner at a time and is topped off with a mix of white and nougat tiles. It’s a fairly quick process with no complicated steps and a lot of repetition. Bag 4 contains 72 copies of a single element – a 3×3 plate – with a single instruction to just affix them all in a layer. The end result is quite sturdy with a thickness of 3 bricks and a tile.
Bags 7-22 cover the canvas and a first layer of paint made up mostly of tiles. If you’ve built LEGO’s Mona Lisa set, a big difference here is that rather than completing the entire canvas first, Sunflowers alternates between “wooden” backing and “painted” canvas tiles. A familiar pattern quickly comes into focus. We open a bag of mostly brown elements to build a strip of the backing. This is followed by three canvas panels, one bag each, that are then affixed to the backing. All told there are 12 panels in this process.
The first three canvas panels are assembled across a pair of 6×16 plates. The remaining nine use a single 16×16 plate. The first nine panels are overwhelming covered by a mix of tiles in cool yellow, interspersed by plates in black, green, brown, purple blue, and red offering connection points for the layers to come. The final three panels, focus on bright yellow and nougat for the tabletop and vase. As with building the frame, this process is fairly straight forward being effectively a single layer of tiles, plates, and the occasional clip. It’s a pretty zen-like process, akin to painting by numbers. For those more interested in parts than process, there are a lot of lovely long reddish-brown bricks and plates hidden underneath the canvas.
Just when it looks like the canvas is complete, here comes bag 23 – a step that holds a special place in the designers’ hearts, as it represents a hidden bit of authenticity. In the original painting, Van Gogh extended the painting surface by hammering on an extra strip of wood at the top to allow for more room for his flowers. Bag 23 has you build that extra strip, which snaps onto the to of the picture, completing our brick replica surface. The broad strokes of the painting are there in the foundations, more Abstract than Impressionist at this stage.
At this stage, two thirds of the way into the build, I was getting a bit eager for for new techniques and more of a distinctive Van Gogh style. Unfortunately we’ll have to wait a bit longer as bag 24 just has you adding a layer of tiles along the outer rim of the canvas.
With bag 25, we begin the layering process that turns a flat mosaic into a brilliant evocation of Van Gogh’s style of thickly applied paints that play with light and shadow. First we focus on building up the vase, which includes our one printed tile in the set – Vincent’s signature. Oftentimes special parts like this get a little extra fanfare in the build process, but here it’s just another one of the 11 tiles you add in a step. A missed opportunity, perhaps, to celebrate the painter. (I brought out my minifig from Starry Night to help do the honors.) We also apply the flex tubes to demarcate the table and background.
Bag 26 has us assemble our first sunflower! Two of them, actually. These steps feel in kind with a Botanicals set, which makes sense, given that we’re creating three-dimensional flower petals. Primarily warm gold elements, with a smattering of nougat and dark tan, are arranged around a green steering wheel element. This technique will be used, with variations, for seven of the painting’s sixteen flowers.
The remaining flowers are built as layers on top of the mosaic base. We get the first of these in bag 27. Flowers like these tend to incorporate more colors and asymmetry and were my favorite part of the build.
Bag 34 includes the final flower that affixes to the last gap in the canvas via a Technic pin. This particular flower is the brightest of the bunch with large petals in a curve made from 1×2 round tiles.
This last bag also includes long brown axles that are used to affix the frame to the canvas. Snapping them each into place is quite satisfying.
The finished model
No doubt about it, the finished art piece is striking. This is the largest painting to be adapted to LEGO to date, and this bigger scale allows for wonderful detail to match the original painting. The layered sunflowers pop out from the canvas at a depth of about 3 bricks, which captures the feeling of Van Gogh’s thick layers of paint and ensures the painting looks good from any angle. Like the original painting, the color palette is primarily made up of three shades of yellow – in this case, cool yellow for the background, bright yellow for the table, pot, and outspread petals, and warm gold for the clustered petals. The added depth creates shadows that add more range to the colors. Even the gaps between layers of the mosaic add to the texture.
It looks great on the wall – with a size and presence that could fit with many a décor. The set uses the same wall hanger as previous Art sets, but be warned – it’s less reinforced than Starry Night. The hanger is perfectly secure while the painting is on the wall, but be careful removing from the nail or you might lever the backing right off the painting.
As the second LEGO set based on a Van Gogh painting, how does Sunflowers stand up next to Starry Night? Well, “stand up” is an appropriate question, as while Starry Night is designed to work on both shelf and wall, Sunflowers is purely for hanging. Starry Night has significantly more depth, being a more of a diorama mimicking a painting, instead of constraining itself to the frame. Each set replicates Van Gogh’s style in a different way. Which is more effective is subjective, but Sunflowers has the added backing of the family estate. It’s also nearly twice as large (although by weight they’re quite similar as Starry Night is so dense and thick!)
Conclusions and recommendations
As a display set, Sunflowers is beautiful. I found the Mona Lisa set to be a bit kitsch with its gold frame and paint-by-numbers finished look. (Sorry, not for me.) Sunflowers, is much more successful as a synthesis of artist style and LEGO construction. I’d put it on par with The Wave of Kanagawa as an aesthetic success as décor. And with the added size, it looks even better hanging on the wall.
The build process, however, is not nearly as interesting as the end result. For 25 of the 34 bags, you’re stacking bricks and tiles in the most conventional ways just to set the backdrop for the large canvas. The final 10 bags finally mix things up, but even half of those are repeating the same radial flower petal pattern.
While Sunflowers might be the more faithful adaptation of Van Gogh’s work, I found Starry Night to be a better encapsulation of the artist’s process and impact. Layering tile over tile to create the background was laborious but also a magical experience unlike any other set that I’ve built. Building outward and dramatically bursting beyond the frame turned a painting into an immersive experience. Starry Night also included a minifig of Vincent and an easel with a printed tile of the painting. This bonus is sorely missed here, and something I wish LEGO had handled differently with the Art line. Imagine slowly adding printed tile versions of each masterpiece in the line, letting collectors make their own Louvre of LEGO tiles.
If you fancy hanging a beautiful Van Gough on your wall, Sunflowers is a masterpiece. Just prepared to give your thumbs a workout to get there.
LEGO 31215 Van Gogh Sunflowers comes with 2,615 pieces and is available on March 1st for US $199.99 | CAN $259.99 | UK £169.99.
The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
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