Colours - why even bother?

If you read this tutorial, you've probably had lego as a hobby for a while, and started noticing that you have a lot of parts in strange colours you rarely or never use.

I'll hazard a guess, that if you're building 'seriously' with lego, you're probably drawn to more conservative or realistic colourschemes like me. Unfortunately most of your collection has come from sets aimed at kids, and tend to include a lot of 'childish' signal colours like red, blue, yellow that you rarely see in the real world - at least in quantity.

You may even dislike certain colours, and avoid buying interesting sets with large quantities of wierd colours such as lime.

And that's really too bad!

Because having a large collection of colours you never use is a huge waste of money - especially if you run out of the colours you do use all the time, stunting your creativity or forcing you to buy even more lego.

... and because stuff looks better in colour!

Colour is much more than efficient use of your lego collection, it's an important part of any design you make:

Designs from the '90ties - booooring!I began getting interested in colours when I joined the international community of (space) lego hobbyists around 2003/2004: Before that I'd build quite a few spaceships, but although many of these were fairly cool shapewise, I realized that they looked pretty dull compared to other peoplels designs - simply because I'd kept them in basically grey with a few transparent colours and black details if you were lucky.Until then I'd designed

In order to remedy this, I conciously started to collect parts in all the colours I could lay my hands on, and the wierder the better. This strategy did have an effect, but not as much as I'd hoped, because my designs basically went from grey to, uhm, one colour+greys.
In the summer of 2008 I decided to do some research on colour theory to remedy this, and this colourscheme tutorial is the result.

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In the next section, we'll test your colour preferences in order to figure out which colours you like, which colours you use, and which colours ought to start hoarding.

[return to colour tutorial index]

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