I don’t remember when or how it came up, but recently, Miss G and I were talking about mandalas… Grae asked what makes a mandala a mandala, and since I’m by no means an expert, we popped online to do a little bit of research. What we learned is that artistically, mandalas are detailed circular designs that often contain repeating patterns and shapes. We took a look at lots of gorgeous mandala images and read a little bit about what they symbolize too, which was really interesting. So when I was thinking about fun and different ways we could use our LEGO collection for LEGO Week, I had mandalas on my mind – hence our LEGO mandala art.
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This was such a fun and easy activity, though we did do a little bit of prep work to allow the creative process to really flow once we got there. To start off, we pulled out our LEGO bins and started finding sets of four exact bricks. We decided on a particular colour palette of whites, greens, blues, yellows, and pinks {you can find all of our colours in these sets} and stuck with that, but of course anything goes when it comes to colours. Once we had a set of four, we moved the bricks into an ice cube tray slot to keep the pieces together.
Here’s what we had to work with when we started. As you can see, some of the slots have more than four bricks, and that’s just because we doubled up sets to save space. Other than our bricks, the only other thing we needed was a big square LEGO baseplate and then we were good to go!
The first step to actually creating our mandala was finding the very centre of our baseplate and marking it with a 2×2 brick {since our goal was to keep our design as ‘circular’ as possible}.
From there, we began adding pieces, four at a time, one to each side of our centre brick {again, with keeping the finished piece as circular as possible in mind}.
This was such a fun process once we got going. For this first round, Miss G and I took turns adding sets of four bricks, and Sam added his creative flare wherever he could – hah!
Part way through, we decided that layering some embellishments on top of our LEGO mandala might be fun, so we gathered up the pieces we usually use as plates, plus lots of little flower tops too. We began the embellishing with a single circular piece in the centre and then continued adding bricks to our main design.
Miss G really loved the process as she’s learned a lot about symmetry in school this year and thought it was fun that she got to play with two lines of symmetry with this activity.
At a certain point, when our basic mandala shape was filling the majority of our baseplate space and had a fairly ‘circular’ shape, we decided to stop adding bricks…
And turn our focus to the embellishment phase of the project.
Here’s our finished collaborative piece… Isn’t it pretty?
Afterwards, Miss G went on to create her own independent LEGO mandala on a smaller square baseplate which goes to show just how much she enjoyed the process, so we’ll definitely be creating more LEGO mandalas soon!
If you also have little ones that love DUPLO and LEGO, be sure to pop over to Toddler Approved and check out the huge collection of LEGO activities Kristina is adding to each day this week. There are several of us kid bloggers participating in LEGO Week this year and not only do the activity ideas span a huge range of ages, but they’re also awesome! Also, be sure to check out our previous LEGO activities here.