Ok, so both contrasting colours and balancing of colours are important when creating colourschemes, in this third and last part of the colour theory summary, we look at how to position colours on your mocs.

Like with contrast and balance it is worth considering colour positioning as a linear scale from scattered to grouped. Both extremes have their possibilities and drawbacks:

Grouping: Mocs with extreme grouping of colours can easily end up breaking apart visually because the coloured sections simply don’t look as parts of the same whole: consider a moc with two strong colours in either end: the design have to be very homogenous to keep the isolated sections together.
The more dissimilar the colours are, the more pronounced this effect would be, while more harmonious colours will decrease it. Contrasting colours might go both ways as they are both attracting and repelling each other.

Scattering: While extreme grouping tend to polarize the design into isolated sections, too much scattering simply dissolves the moc into a flickr of colours that confuse the eye. Frankly I’m not sure that pronounced scattering is generally good for anything, although Peter L. Morris has made some pretty cool fighters with patchy colouring.

Both grouping and scattering of colours have their benefits, but how do you control it? Here’s two suggestions:

Patterning: is a good way to organize an otherwise messy-looking scattered colourscheme: arrange the colours into stripes or other designs repeated across the moc: bonus points for creating logos or symbols and repeating the colours at other sections of the craft.

Bleeding (or inter-penetration): is a good way to break up larger chunks of colours by infusing sections or lines from the surrounding areas or colour-chunks – like a jigsaw puzzle.

That should be the basics when it comes to colour positioning, I hope you’ll mix the concepts freely – how about a colourscheme with a few larger chunks of colours connected by stripes spreading all over the moc?

Simultaneous contrast: A final little trick from colour theory relevant to colour positioning is simultaneous contrast:
Basically simultaneous contrast is about how colours affect each other when placed in close proximity: as I mentioned in the last blogpost about colour balance, lighter and darker colours need to be added in unequal amounts to appear balanced – when you place a bright colour next to a darker one, the brighter colour will shine while the darker colour will vane. This effect is especially pronounced when it comes to contrasting colours:

Yellow sections within a larger purple block will shine, while the reverse will result in a dull greyish purple sections within the yellow, and the same thing happens when you position blue and orange next to each other.

Red and green doesn’t behave this way because they’ve almost got the same brightness, so the most pronounced effect here will be a vibrant, almost glowing seam between the colours (no it isn’t just bad jpg-compression ;-) – which is probably one of the reasons why The Lego Company haven’t changed the Octan stripe and logo for years.

Ok, that was all the colour theory I’d dug up, but as soon as I’ve figured out precisely what to search for and have the time, I’m planning to create a small collection of mocs with interesting colourschemes for inspiration. You can see the previous posts on the subject here:

Colours - bad or misunderstood? (why do we leave most of our collection unused?)
Colourscheme part 1 - Introduction and conttrast
Colourscheme part 2 - Colour balance

Eventually I hope to assemble and rewrite the whole lot into a five-part tutorial for the article-section, but I’m awfully busy with real life stuff, and other lego projects are queing up. Anyways, happy Christmas and keep building!

I made this little microscale fleet ages ago, and posted a few pictures on Flickr back in 2007, so it’s about time that I get around adding it to this page:

Another batch of three old models, first a shoddy prototype wip, then a fairly boring model testing out an interesting but obsolete technique, and finally a really cool spacefighter with wings fanned out like bird-feathers!
Enjoy:

 

Using tans neon green antenna whips for legs and placing the cockpit in the “hump” of the mosquito, the last of the Myg-series was the most mosquito-like of them all. The other one is fairly simple hypotech, but with interesting use of those 6×6 octagonal frames. Check ‘em out:

  

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Although this moc is old, I still very much like it because the geometry turned out very well, so check it out:

Thanks to LDView, I also got around to post some decent pictures of my old Space P38-contest entry:

You might’ve noticed that I didn’t posted anything last week: I’m really busy with work until after Christmas, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to invest in the page until then…

Here’s the last microscale fighter in the series. I really like the poseability you can achieve by combining the classic trans-clear SW-shooter satnd with a 1×1 bracket:

Almost too weak for stuff this size though :(

Uploaded a microscale fighter inspired by my latest Z-Fighters. While adjusting the lighting in levels, I discovered that you can actually save the settings and use them for more pictures:

It’s still a little cumbersome, as you have to open the file for every picture (Load…), but at least the lighting on the pictures will be more consistent - especially if you adjust the midpoint as well, instead of just squeezing the brightest and darkest tones together (which was the case with this moc.

If anybody know a good way to batch-adjust a bunch of pictures, I’d love to know (especially if you can add a watermark in the same process).

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