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