31220 Claude Monet – Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies is the next set on the way from LEGO Art and Model Designer Stijn Oom tells Blocks about he crafted the new model.
LEGO Art has grown over the years to offer a variety of models, including brick interpretations of truly iconic works – like last year’s 31215 Vincent van Gogh – Sunflowers. Model Designer Stijn Oom has been busy working on his follow-up to that colourful set, now unveiling 31220 Claude Monet – Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies to the world.
The new set uses 3,179 pieces, retails for £179.99 / $249.99 / €199.99 and will launch on March 1, 2026.
Once again, Stijn has immersed himself in the history of the 1897 masterpiece. “Claude Monet was on a train ride and he looked out of the window, he was in between Normandy and Paris. He saw this really cute, beautiful town called Giverny.
“He was like, ‘I want to move here. I want to move to this place. It’s gorgeous.’ He takes his large family, finds a nice property to rent and moves in. The nice thing about this property is that it had a really nice garden.
“A lot of people don’t know that besides being an incredible painter, Monet was also an excellent gardener. And he decides that he wants to spend the rest of his life working on creating this beautiful garden.
“He buys an extra plot of land. Even though he has never been to Japan, he is super inspired by Japanese artwork and woodblock prints, so he decides that he wants to implement all of these features in his garden. You see the Japanese footbridge. He imports a lot of beautiful, exotic flowers, like all of the different water lilies.
“The funny thing about this is that he did not intend to create this beautiful garden with the idea of painting it. The gardening and the painting were two separate things until one moment when he decides to start looking better at his own garden and realises how pretty it actually is and the joy he gets from it.”
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For the design team though, it wasn’t a case of getting inspiration from the world around them – they had to research the painting and figure out how to adapt it using the LEGO System.
“Andrew did the first initial sketch for this and it was a very detailed, very parts-intensive model,” Stijn tells Blocks. “The main thing that we had in mind, especially when I started developing, was the building experience.
“It’s the same thing with the Sunflowers, it’s a very tedious job to place all these small little elements. Our main takeaway was to try and stylise it so that it’s actually a fun building experience. Also keeping in mind that a lot of people who will probably pick this up may not have experience with building LEGO sets.”
Although 31215 Vincent van Gogh – Sunflowers has taught Stijn some lessons about successfully adapting these artworks, he had to approach 31220 Claude Monet – Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies differently.
“van Gogh had a very stylised way of painting. It’s very graphic. It has all these outlines and he really painted with colour. Whereas, this is very colorful, but Monet painted based on light, based on emotion his feeling towards it… he would often blink his eyes and pick all these different lights. We tried to do that here, to mimic his way of painting and actually use the bricks as a medium in a sense.”
To convey the actual piece, Stijn has used bar elements so give the sense of brushstrokes. “We did some different iterations, of course, and we made some tweaks here and there,” he says. “The bars were all touching each other in the beginning, so we deliberately left some gaps to create that brush stroke effect, and also tried to implement some other elements like the carrot tops in order to make sure we did not have a very monotonous kind of technique.”
It’s not just the choice of elements though that gives the new set the flavour of the actual painting though – it’s also the all-important colour choices.
“I made a joke to Milan Madge, our design colleague, and I said, ‘I think we’re almost using every single colour that we currently have available in the colour palette.’ I think our main consideration was to mimic the artwork as well as possible and to very much zoom into all the different swaths of colour.
“If I stand up close to the set, I can see all the different elements, but the further you go back, the more it starts to look like the original painting. Which is of course, what makes his style so interesting and intriguing.”
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