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

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…