I arranged this Photoshop Challenge on CSF back in 2006, so I guess it’s about time i get it uploaded to the page: Everybody had the same spaceship setup on a blue screen, and everybody did a great job!
Check out how I made the setup and what people made of it (in Miscellaneous>scenes).

Are any of you readers interested in having another go?
I consider creating a sequence of three setups with dogfighting among large container carriers: If you keep the style consistent (but vary the backgrounds), they could be linked into a comic-strip-type action sequence.

I have about 30 mocs from 2003-2004 awaiting upload, but haven’t really been able to come up with an idea on how to manage this huge task: Rendering with LDPAO/POV-Ray takes several hours per moc, and I’m not even going to consider rebuilding the moc and photographing it in real life. Using LDView turns out to be very fast (under an hour), and I’m quite satisfied with the result.

The primary reason it’s so much faster is that the program automatically save the snapshots with a name similar to the previous one (unlike digital photos). You can also set a fixed image size, and with the program’s automatic cropping, you almost doesn’t need photoshop…
Unfortunately the automatic cropping eats the outermost edgelines, so you still have to run all the photos through the usual crop & resize.

With most of my newer moc-presentations, I’m using 400×300 images in the text and linking to larger 800×600 versions. And frankly, I don’t think that anybody is actually clicking them anyways, so in the future, I think I’ll just cut out the doubles.

For a long time, I’ve been using MLCad to design specific details on mocs I’ve been building, but since December, I’ve begun designing complete craft directly in the program.
So far I’ve only found two of these designs worth rendering in lego (this and the black fighter crashtested a while back).

But I can definitly recommend this approach: firstly because designing is much faster in MLCad (or on paper), so generally you’ll have many more designs to choose among, once you’ve finally got the time to pick up the bricks, and secondly, you’re sure it’ll actually work, unlike the ‘vague idea that might look good’ that is the usual starting point when we design directly in lego:

Concept art mocs almost always pwns anything we can design directly in lego, but more about that later, when I’ve finished my colourscheme-investigation

Ok, we all want to make better colourschemes, and use more of our collections, but once you’ve decided on some particular colours, how much of each should you use? In this second part of the colour-investigation, we’ll take a look at colour balance:

Quantity contrast
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, that different colours have different brightness (ie. if you turn a colour photograph into black and white, the colours will be converted to different shades of grey).
Back in the 19th century Goethe came to the same realization and attached the following brightness values to primary and secondary colours: 

Brightness values are used to calculate how much you need of two contrasting colours in order to balance them:
Yellow-purple = 9:3 =3:1
Orange-blue = 8:4 = 2:1
Red-green = 6:6 = 1:1

• This means that in a dual contrasting colourscheme you’ll have to use
  Three times as much purple to balance out yellow,
• Twice as much blue to balance out orange, while
• Equal amounts of red and green would be balanced.

It would probably be possible to reach more precise numbers for the different lego colours by testing the official RGB/CMYK-values in photoshop, but for the purpose of designing lego colourschemes that would probably be overkill.
To illustrate these numbers, Goethe also made special colour-wheel with proportionate amounts of the 6 primary and secondary colours, which I’ve tried to recreate in lego above.

Colour mixing
Another interesting aspect of the colour theory as explained by Edwards (2004), is how you mix colours:

• Black: Equal amounts of the primary colours (red, blue and yellow) create a very pretty black.
• Accent/highlight: colours can be shaded or tinted by adding a tiny amount of its complementary colour: this should result in a pretty or vibrant shading/lighting of the colour.
• Muddy colours: If you mix larger but unequal amounts of all the primary colours the result is usually some dirty looking version of brown.

If we tentatively consider a the various colours in a moc as a single, mixed colour, it might be possible to explain why some colourschemes work better than others, and possibly show the way towards some unusual combinations:

Rainbow warriors are usually frowned upon among serious lego hobbyists, but bright colours need not be such a bad thing: All bright colours are based on one or more of the primary colours (yellow, red and blue), so if these three colours are represented in equal amounts in the colourscheme, it might actually work under the heading of “pretty black”.
However, if large quantities have been used in unbalanced proportions, for instance if two of the primary colours are heavily represented compared to the third (in the moc as a whole or in particular sections), the colourscheme might be compared to the “muddy” colour mix.
Generally speaking, though, good colour grouping will counter this effect, because colour mixing will at least be reduced at the local level (more about this next time).

The ‘three colour rule’ is often handed down to less experienced builders to improve their building – with a glint in the eye, because although it definitely work, there aren’t really any rules when it comes to lego.
However, viewing a colourscheme as a single colour created from the three primary colours might support this ‘rule’:
As an example we can pick a subtle and inoffensive colourscheme based on equal amounts of blue, green and orange:
At first glance, there isn’t any contrasting colours, because all of them are situated in the same side of the colour-wheel, which result in a subtle analogous colourscheme.
However, if we break down the colours in their primary component we get something like this:

(Blue) + (green) + (orange) =
(Blue + blue) + (blue + yellow) + (yellow + red) =
3 blue + 2 yellow + 1 red

Not only does this mean that the colourscheme contain a pair of contrasting colours (red and green), it also adhere to the ‘three colour rule’ by having three colours in decreasing amounts (“primary”, “secondary”, and “accent colour”).

This sort of ‘internal contast’ might also explain the huge popularity of the “new” earth-toned colours in the lego palette (dark red, -blue, -green, -grey, tan etc.):

As it can be seen from the CMYK-values, the brownish shades of these colours is created by mixing in all the primary colours as well as white or black, and they will therefore match any colour or greyscale you’d care to throw at them.
By containing all the primary colours in unequal amounts, they furthermore arrive with the ‘three colour rule’ already build in, with the result that colourschemes primarily based on greyscales and any one of these colours rarely fail.

Next time we’ll take a look at the third parameter: Colour positioning.

* Betty Edwards 2004: Color - A course in mastering the art of mixing colors

When I returned home today, I was reminded the charred wreck of an Israeli jetfighter in the Sinai desert when I saw my latest MOC - barely finished the day before yesterday after months of work.
My grandmother denied having touched it, and the watering can kept silent.

Anyways, I’ve been pretty silent for the last couple of weeks, because I’ve started on a new education and everything is pretty busy at the moment: I’m not sure if I’ll get more or less time for the blog in the near future…

There’s a ton of literature and webpages about colourschemes, and both you and I have better things to do than studying all of them. In the following, therefore, I’ll try to assemble a simple, logical theory of colourschemes that doesn’t take an entire book to explain.

First premise:
There are basically four parameters you can adjust when it comes to colourschemes:

• Contrast: How complementary are the colours?
• Balance: How much are there of each colour compared to the others?
• Position: How are the colours positioned?
• Colour saturation/hue/shading: Strengthening, weakening or altering the individual colours.

Listed in order of importance: for instance, use of the last parameter when building with Lego is severely limited by the available palette)

Second premise:
Depending on how you vary the parameters, the colourscheme will vary between static/dynamic and boring/confusing: The goal is to hit the golden mean where everything is just right (I just recycled a part of my design theory for this one).

First parameter: Contrast (complementary colours)
Theory: Harmonious colourschemes are based on a kind of idealized colouring that; for instance, make flower paintings prettier than the real thing. According to Goethe & co this is because the brain wish to compensate or balance out dominating colours:

If you look at something red, the brain wants green (complementary or opposite colours on the colour-wheel), if you look at heavily saturated red, it wants lighter tones also (opposite saturation), and if the colour is shaded with grey or black, the brain wish to balance this as well.

Returning to the second premise, we don’t want to make things too pretty because it’ll end up too boring, on the other hand, we don’t want it too provoking either, cause at the other end of the scale the colourscheme just collapses into a complete mess.

Since it’s really easy to screw things up, so your best bet is probably to aim at “harmonious with a little twist” – or at least start out from there.

Practice: Somewhat similar to your colour television, the contrast button basically goes from weak greyscale to strong pairs of complementary colours:

Dual complementary colourscheme: Starting at the strong end of the contrast-scale, the dual complementary colourscheme is probably as harsh as it gets, especially if the colours are placed right next to each other.

Tetrad colourschemes: Made out of two pairs of complementary colours with equal distance on the colour-wheel. These colourschemes should combine prettiness (because they contain all the primary colours) with double complementarity. With a twelve-colour colour-wheel, you’ll unfortunately end up with one primary, one secondary and two of the extremely rare tertiary colours.

Split complementary colourshemes: Basically the same as duals, only you’ve split one of the colours into the two neighbouring colours on the colour-wheel in order to water down the contrast.

Triad colourschemes: Made out of three colours with equal distance on the colour-wheel. Pretty because they, like tetrad schemes, contain all of the primary colours, but less contrasting because none of them are directly complementary.

Non-complementary colourschemes: Naturally, colourschemes doesn’t have to be based on complementary pairs of colour. If they’re placed more than 60 degrees from each other on the colour-wheel you might achieve an elegant semi-complementary scheme, because primary and secondary colours from opposite sides of the wheel will be contained within the colours chosen. The same goes for earth tones, as these are based on all three primary colours.
If the colours are placed less than 60 degrees from each other, you could argue that we’re really talking about analogous colourschemes instead:

Analogous colourschemes: Are based on colours sitting close to each other on the colour-wheel such as yellow green, yellow, yellow orange and orange. While this kind of scheme will create pleasing variations in what would usually be one colour + greyscale, they lack the true dynamism of a complementary colourscheme.

One colour + greyscale: One step above plain greyscale, a single colour can add a splash of life that these colourschemes usually lack:

Greyscale colourschemes: With greyscale you can still get a heavy light-dark contrast, however, without the liveliness of colours, most of these schemes end up being either dull greyish or confusing zebra-schemes that are particularly difficult to photograph.

Ok, I haven’t had time to write or photograph more, so instead of dragging things out for several weeks and hit you over the head with a huge(r) blogpost, I’ll cut it off here.
In the following blogposts I plan to continue with the other parameters (balance, positioning, and saturation/hue/shading), followed by a small series of posts with examples of spacemocs announced on CSF (hopefully Jainsguide/CSF moc announcements are back up soon).

I don’t know how widespread Tetra Pak containers are outside Northern Europe, but if you can get your hand on some (or something similar), they can easily be converted to really handy sorting bins.

I’ve added an article about it to the page.

Finally got around uploading my Cave Racer from more than two months ago:

I really liked this fad, but I’ve been so much out of the loop that I don’t even know if it’s still running…

So why do we dislike certain colours while constantly using others?
In one of the books I’ve borrowed*, the second task after creating a colour-wheel is to paint two squares, one with the colours we like, and the other with the ones we don’t.

I just did the excercise this morning and would sincerely hope you’ll try it out too: If you’re like me, you use certain colours way too much, while others are collecting dust in the boxes - concience about which and why is the first step to remedy the problem, either experimenting more or simply stocking up on certain colours.
Anyways, here’s mine: because comparative rarity of certain colours and part availability, I ended up parting it up in 5 categories instead of the original 2:

Doing the exercise made me realize a couple of very interesting things:

• While I don’t really dislike any colours in particular, I do tend to prefer greyscale and more somber earth-tones (or guaches)  - I believe this is because I haven’t really made any ‘real’ colourschemes yet:
• The fact that I group most of the primary and secondary colours in the “too powerful for spaceship”-category - I’m pretty sure that this is because the majority of my later spaceships have usually been “one-colour+greyscale”: Especially primary colours ARE very dominant on their own, and the only reason I’ve even considered using red is probably because we’re used to sportscars of that colour. However, beside the culturally accepted “signal colours” for sportscars, construction equipment etc., it ought to be possible to use the primary and secondary colours in quite large quantities if they’re combined with sufficient amounts of greyscale, complementary, and/or analogue colours (colours next to eachother).
• Most of the tertiary colours end up in the lighter pastel-colour group: Usually it’s not possible to create colourschemes based on these colours because they’re rare, and because you usually can’t even get the nessecary parts in the most basic part categories: bricks, plates, slopes, and tiles.
  In principle, you can use them for analogous colourschemes, but these will often end up looking pretty “splotchy” because the gaps in the part-palettes makes it hard to group the individual parts together - and since they often look a lot like a primary or secondary colour anyways, it’s often a lot easier to just use that instead.

Next time we’ll take a look at how you can use the colour-wheel to create harmonious colourschemes:
If you haven’t build one yet, hurry back to the previous post to see how, place it where you’ll see it as much as possible (I’ve added an 2×3 black brick behind the purple so it can stand upright), and try to learn it by heart.

* Betty Edwards 2004: Color - A course in mastering the art of mixing colors

So, why do you want to make a colour-wheel, how does it work, and how can you make one out of lego yourself?

Personally I’ve had a too strong tendency to consider colours as a linear scale, usually from red to purple (which may be because I’ve gotten used to stacking bricks).
Although rainbow-scales are pretty to look at and good for analogous colourschemes made out of bright colours (like yellow-orange-red), they won’t help you if you wish to work with the much more effectful contrasting colourschemes (or understanding more complex colours such as tan: yellow, orange, and a pinch of blue or dark red: red with pinches of yellow and blue).

Picture time! Here’s the colour-wheel I made just after returning home for the weekend:

Contrasting colours are the ones sitting opposite eachother, like red/green, yellow/orange etc. An interesting fact is that if you mix up all primary colours you’ll get brownish colours - if it’s possible to consider a colourscheme as a “unified” colour, this may explain why “rainbow-warrior”-schemes are generally frowned upon - because it ends up messy or muddy.
The colour-wheel might help you create the much talked about 3-colour-scheme, if you consider each of the primary colours as primary, secondary and accent (I haven’t actually tested this yet, but I’m fairly sure it should work pretty well).

Enough talk for today, here’s the reverse of my colour-wheel so you can build one yourself:

Ah well, a little more ;) - tertiary colours are named after the primary colour and secondary colour next to it - ie. yellow-orange, for instance, is the one between yellow and orange.
I’ve used the following lego-colours for tertiary colours (counter clockwise): acid green (yellow-green), teal (blue-green), royal blue (blue-purple), light purple (red-purple) and earth orange (red-orange), and light orange (yellow-orange).

I’m definitly not satisfied with the royal blue (colour seem ok, but it’s too light) and earth orange (too muddy: must have some blue in there) - If you have any better suggestions, I’d love to see a picture.