Make my DIY Mr. Gold costume to turn yourself or your child into the legendary Mr. Gold LEGO for Halloween. This costume won second place in the LEGOLAND California Brick-or-Treat costume contest but is easy enough for just about anyone to make.
Do you know about Mr. Gold at LEGOLAND? He’s the famous and elusive catch of any LEGO lover. Mr. Gold is a SUPER rare Minifigure who has been further immortalized by becoming a collectible pop badge at LEGOLAND. The only way to get a Mr. Gold badge is to find an employee wearing him and to ask very nicely if they have Mr. Gold.
There are only a few each day floating around LEGOLAND so it’s kind of a big deal to find Mr. Gold. If you do find him, you can trade him in for a free ticket to come back to LEGOLAND. However, many Mr. Gold hunters prefer to keep him as a rare collectible.
Kayla and I decided to hunt for him on our visit to LEGOLAND California for the opening of the LEGOLAND Castle Hotel and she struck gold.
In fact, I’m certain that if we did nothing else on that trip but find Mr. Gold she would have been psyched. We commemorated her victory with a photo by the giant Mr. Gold located near the entrance of the park. He’s since been relocated to watch over LEGOLAND from above. If you stand back a bit from the guest services and big store area, and look up and you’ll see Mr. Gold on the roof.
This year, with Brick -or-Treat (LEGOLAND’s big Halloween celebration) on the horizon I asked Kayla if she wanted to dress up and if she had any ideas for a costume. Within moments we settled on the beloved Mr. Gold. And then I had to figure out how to make him come to life. A quick Google search revealed not one LEGO Mr. Gold Costume tutorial. Which was surprising to me.
So I set out to make a Mr. Gold costume that didn’t require fine arts degree, and that most parents out there could replicate with a few supplies and minimal time input. I applaud the people who spend tens or hundreds of hours on elaborate costumes, but I like to keep mine simple and easy enough for most of us to do on a weekend afternoon.
To make my DIY LEGO Mr. Gold Costume you’ll need:
- A full body LEGO costume. I used this Ninjago costume which I found at Target on sale for $28.00 and included the top, bottom and hands. It also included a mask but that wouldn’t work for Mr. Gold. If you can get your hands on this LEGO costume, it’ll work perfectly and you won’t even need the extra mask below.
- A LEGO mask with a plain face. Only if your costume doesn’t come with a traditional lego head.
- A basic costume top hat.
- A cheap toy magnifying glass or similar plastic circle for Mr. Gold’s monocle.
- Gold Spray paint (I always use this kind) and recommend 2-3 cans of it to be sure you have enough to cover everything.
- White spray paint for Mr. Gold’s LEGO hands.
- A mask for yourself to keep those paint fumes away.
- A black paint pen – I tried a few and found I had the best luck with this kind.
- A white or light colored crayon. Steal one from your kids.
- A hot glue gun to affix the monocle.
Here’s what you’ll need to do to make this DIY Mr. Gold costume:
First things first, pop on your protective mask and lay down a piece of cardboard outside to spray paint on top of. You’ll need to spray the torso and legs pieces of the costume completely with gold spray paint. While it’s not a must, I found that this was easier if you stuffed the torso with a cardboard box to help keep its shape.
For the legs, you can stick a roll of paper towels in the bottoms of each pant leg (cover them in plastic bags if you still want to be able to use them after!), use bubble wrap or cardboard boxes if you have them. There’s no perfect method here, just use what you can find that you can stuff in those legs.
You’ll probably need to go over things a couple of times to cover any spots, so be sure you leave yourself some drying time between sprays. The good news about spray paint is it dries fairly quickly.
Next, spray paint the LEGO hands white. The mask and top hat are the easy parts. Spray them to make them completely gold on the outside and let them dry.
When everything is dry, you can start working on Mr. Gold’s face. Let me preface this by saying that I cannot draw for my life and find freehand drawing incredibly stressful. I printed out a picture of Mr. Gold and grabbed one of Blake’s white crayons to sketch his face on the mask.
Using a light colored crayon allowed me to create guidelines for when I switched over to the black paint pen. But I also knew that if I made a mistake with the black paint pen I could simply re-spray the mask with gold paint and get a do over. Remember that. If you. mess up here, it’s completely fixable.
The good news is, Mr. Gold’s face consists of fairly simple lines, so by breaking it down, line by line I became a bit more confident. The other good news is that it’s a Halloween costume for a child. So no one’s life depends on your success. What I felt was still imperfect, Kayla was absolutely delighted by. Just remember that you’ll probably be your own worst critic here.
After the crayon, I pulled out my paint pen and got to work. I tried a couple of different black paint pens and felt the best one for the job was a chiseled tip paint pen like this one. It allowed me to draw thick, smooth lines fairly easily.
For Mr. Gold’s Monocle, I applied minimal pressure to a cheap toy magnifying glass and the handle popped right off. The one I used was one you’ll find in the bins of party favors in places party stores for fifty cents or less.
I used my black paint pen to paint the edges of the magnifying glass, let it dry and then hot glued it on to the mask. Charger, forever my trusty crafting companion decided this was the ideal time to try to get my attention.
Feeling more confident after completing my DIY Mr. Gold costume mask, I moved on to drawing his torso. I kept the cardboard box inside of the torso that I had used during painting and it was a huge help to have the sturdy surface.
Again, I relied on my white crayon to sketch his jacket, vest and tie. Breaking things down line by line made the non-artist in me feel like it was possible. This took me about 15 minutes. Once I felt good about my crayon outline I started using the black paint pen to go over the lines. I found that the paint pen was a breeze to use on the fabric costume and re-tracing my outline went quickly. After that, all I had to do was hot glue the top hat to the top of my Mr. Gold mask and help Kayla get into the costume to try it on.
As Kayla is ten and as she gets older, she’s started gravitating towards more simple costumes. Gone are the days of the princess dresses and here are the days of costumes that involve some kind of ears. So even though I had made this Mr. Gold costume with love I felt there was a good chance she’d decide not to wear it.
To my surprise, not only did she want to wear it, she declared that she was going to enter the costume contest at LEGOLAND’s Brick-or-Treat celebration. Uh…okay. The crafter in me started to feel intimidated by that, knowing that some folks go ALL OUT for that contest.
Our family headed to Brick-or-Treat for a night of Halloween fun at LEGOLAND and a sleepover at the LEGOLAND Castle Hotel, which you can read about here.
Kayla proudly wore her Mr. Gold costume for the latter half of Brick-or-Treat. We went costumeless in the beginning to maximize her ability to run around, enjoy treats and score lots of candy and went back to our room to put it on around 7:00pm. Registering for the costume contest was a breeze. We simply showed up to Miniland USA where the contest was being held and looked for the booth to sign up. It had great signage and took just a minute to fill out one line of information.
Also, she won second place with it! If you’ve never checked out the costume contest at Brick-or-Treat let me tell you, the prizes are AWESOME! For her second place win, Kayla received two great LEGO sets and four park hopper tickets to use for future visits. Suffice to say she was on cloud nine at the end of our night at Brick-or-Treat!
Have questions about my DIY Mr. Gold costume? You can always email me at jillian@hellosplendid.com or message me on Instagram (I’m known to hang out on there when I should be sleeping.)
Want to save my DIY Mr. Gold costume to make later? Just pin the image below and it will be waiting for you when you’re ready.
