In early May, I won a $200 gift card to Zulily and I decided I was going to use it to purchase the Lego Globe. Combined with a 10% off coupon code and cashback from Rakuten, the Lego Globe only cost me $12.95 (instead of MSRP of $249.99). I was quite pumped and got right to work when it arrived; it took about 7 hours spread over two days to complete. It was a quick and enjoyable build and now looks great on the bookshelf in my office.
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Sitting in the closet since December was the Lego Batman Batmobile my son had got for his Birthday. No one in our house had done a Lego build like this so I took it on. I was able to build it over three days but didn’t find it the most enjoyable build. When I was done I was like what lego do I want to take on next, that I’ll actually enjoy?
I had been looking at the Lego Typewriter but then the Lego World Map caught my eye. The World Map is currently the largest Lego set available with over 11,000 pieces. It falls within the Lego Art series, so you are actually applying tiles to a single layer of boards that come together to create the piece of art you can hang.
When I saw the World Map’s box I noticed the custom ocean image, where they added an octopus and thought, ok this will be fun. I can do the countries as is and then build out the oceans to be something really fun. Little did I know when I hit order that the custom oceans really are custom. Lego does NOT have instructions for the alternate layout on their site. After a day of searching for other custom ocean versions, I found one I really liked.
The only problem, there weren’t actually instructions for this either, and I could only find one image of it. So I did what seemed the most reasonable, got my laptop out and zoomed in, and just pieced it together as closely as I could. I kept the main features of the bottom 3/4’s as close to the same as the inspiration photo; and then on the final morning when I was working on the top portion I just started googling Pixel Art: Ocean, Sea Animals, Starfish, etc. I used the Excel file from PolicyViz to help make sure placement as going to work out on these upper-row shapes. Very grateful for Jon creating and sharing this free file!
I started the build on a Wednesday night and got the first 4 panels with countries only completed; then completed the remaining panels on Thursday night. Took Friday off; and then spent a chunk of Saturday, and a few hours Sunday morning doing the custom oceans. It probably took about 15 hours all in to build and I am loving the results:
I cannot wait to hang it and now have the hard decision of what to build next!
If you’ve made custom oceans for the World Map, please share a link below, I’d love to see what others have done! And if you’ve got this on your list here is a link to all the inspiration photos I used.
