Colours
If you’re consider a commissioned piece - one of the the first questions that we’ll look to answer is “What colour will we build this?”
It’s not as simple a question as you may think…
Colour schemes
Firstly, it’s useful to understand what we are referring to when we mention a colour. There are multiple ways of referring to a colour and, obviously, ‘red’ is not just ‘red’ - there could be hundreds of reds!
The main colour naming schemes you may have heard of are;
RGB - typically used on the web and in digital media, and specifies a colour by its Red, Green and Blue constituents. Usually there are about 16 million colours in the RGB colour space.
CMYK - more often used in printed media, colours are referred to by a mix of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK.
Pantone - These colours are curated by the Pantone company and are a standard set of colours, mainly for print use. More details are available here.
RAL - more used in Europe is another curated set of colours, mainly for physical things (think powder coated metalwork). More details available here.
There are many more schemes though - you’ll hear about HSL and many more. Just to confuse matters even more, colours from one scheme might not be available in another scheme - or could look completely different! The perception of colour is very complex indeed and worth reading about.
LEGO Colours
When we start to look at models, we will immediately think about the LEGO colour palette which is thankfully fairly fixed. The palette does change over time, but there are of course some colours that never change. Along with the standard Red, Green, Blue, White, Black - we also use the greys and tan colours quite widely. They’re great for a variety of buildings.
(Click to open a large version)
LEGO themselves don’t publish their list of colours - but there are many resources on the web that try to catalogue them. A good reference is available here. What’s important to realise is that any comparison of RGB / CMYK / RAL / LEGO etc colours - is only ever an approximation.
One important thing to note is that not every part is made in every colour. So sometimes we’ll suggest a colour based on which parts are most readily available for your model. If it’s a building that needs arches for instance - then we’ll pick a colour that has arches available. Take a look at our St Pancras model below;
Our model is built in ‘Bright Red’ bricks - the LEGO red you’ll be familiar with. It has ‘Sand Green’ roofs. Looking at it next to the real building, it’s obviously far too bright. The roof colour is totally wrong! But… no-one ever notices. We chose the Bright Red because there is a big enough variety of parts to use and it contrasts well with the roof and stonework. There is a much closer colour, ‘Sand Red’ - but it’s very hard to find parts in that colour as very few were made. Most of the arches don’t exist and even if they did, the cost would be raised 10 fold.
On its own - the model stands out well and there are never any comments about the colour.
Light and Shade and Materials
LEGO bricks are a very reflective surface! In practise, this means that some colours can look very different depending upon the lighting used. For instance, take a look at the areas circled in each of these models:
These areas are all the same colour. In fact, even within a model the perceived colour can vary widely. LEGO bricks reflect much of the light that is projected onto them, so that will greatly affect the perceived colour.
To confuse matters even more…. different bricks will be made from different materials. These reflect light in different ways - so even the same colour bricks may look different to each other!
Finally (for this part!), we need to talk about colour consistency. One of the reasons we use mainly LEGO bricks is the consistency of colour. However, some bricks are better than others. Take a look at these two pictures;
It’s pretty obvious that the colour difference in the white bricks is down to dirt! But what about the dark blue bricks? The colour difference here is from the manufacturing process. These are all brand new dark blue bricks - but the variance in colour can be noticeable in some colours.
Custom Colours
So, what are the options if colour is really - really - important? Well, we can’t influence LEGO in any way, but they are not the only brick manufacturer. If the colour needs to be right, then we can order bricks direct from another manufacturer for you. There is a fairly large minimum order, but this way you can have any colour you like. There are a few caveats though!
Firstly, remember the advice above - custom coloured bricks may vary slightly from your design colours. Our suppliers use the Pantone system and try very hard to get as close as they can - but there are limitations to the moulding process. To take this into account, we will only use bricks of the ‘same colour’ from one manufacturer. So, even though we can order bricks in a ‘standard’ LEGO colour - we won’t mix manufacturers within a colour.
Secondly, if your colour is custom - them no other bricks will exist in that colour! So we’ll need to order all the brick types we need. Even if the model only needs 1 of each.
Finally, there is a (quite large) minimum order quantity for any custom brick in a custom colour.
All in all, this means that if we use a custom colour, there will be usually an additional charge of roughly $1000 - $1500. On a large model where we’ll be using a large quantity of bricks anyway - this usually isn’t a problem. If the model is small though, it could still cost over $1000 just for a 5 brick model!
