Why the Rainbow MOCs and did you do it?

[Smartiepants]

I suppose another question is do you keep what you have built or is the fun in the building & once worked out & done take it apart, all the bits I have done recently have been kept but I guess I will become limited with space & have to start dismantling bits

[krystalKING]

I had only one basic brick set as a kid, and I had to build the rainbow warriors, though not always. I had an idea book, and I would occionsialy build from that.

It was when I got some more sets that I stopped building multicolored towers.From that point on I was a perfectionest, and still am.

[xboxtravis7992]

never have given it a moments thought & always tried to colour co ordinate until i came across this the other day, I think it looks great & cheaper I guess as you can mix & match your stock rather than buy project specific parts

That actually looks kinda cool.

I think it would be interesting to see AFOL's make grown up versions of Rainbow Warriors, you could make a space theme faction out of it.

[Kai NRG]

I probably did it. At least I have a recollection of a very multi-colored castle (but it might have been my brother's...). And once, when we built a kid-sized airplane, we kind of ran out of bricks...

But I did try to stick with logical colors. Or, if necessary, layers... red and white for a house, for example... which made my siblings call it the "peppermint house" (but then, my brother used black and white, so his was a zebra house). I did sometimes try to build using just one color. But whatever I built usually took shape dictated by whatever color I was using, rather than the other way around.

Now I don't mind using a more or less neutral color (usually black or grey) to see how something will look if it's close at hand and the other piece is not worth the trouble of getting out when I'm not sure I'm going to use it - or if I'm using it in another MOC that will be destroyed shortly. (Not more than one or two pieces though; I wouldn't want to go through the trouble of building a whole wall just to see what the texture is like.) But it isn't practical for me to buy a piece for an MOC (as it would take far to long for me to get it - especially since I don't have much patience in that way), so I wouldn't use a wrong color piece as a place holder for a piece I don't have (unless, of course, it won't be visible in the final MOC). As some others have mentioned, that does force me sometimes to come up with a different solution for a build. But there's not much else I can do!

[jimmynick]

I also had a multicoloured castle a few years ago (photograph of one version below). It's an issue of how many bricks children have, and when they build things (when I built things as a child) it was always about the fun of inventing something and making stories to go with what I made, and not the aesthetics of it.

Of course, I always tried to change things out for more suitable colours when I found the parts, but when you're a kid it's not a primary concern.

[MikroMan]

I remember doing it, primarily because of a lack of bricks. My parents and relatives always bought me sets from random themes and I rarely had enough similar bricks to build something larger than a small sapceship. So, rainbow planes were born

[Ardelon]

Just like many others here, I used to build rainbow builds because of limited color availability. Also, I didnt really care about color so much as about shape. As I got older, I tried to add more method to the madness and used colors so that both/all sides of a MOC would be symmetrical, or building floors/storeys of one color etc. Then as a tween, the OCD kicked in and now I try to build in realisitck color schemes, unless its just a trial build.

[Laservampire]

never have given it a moments thought & always tried to colour co ordinate until i came across this the other day, I think it looks great & cheaper I guess as you can mix & match your stock rather than buy project specific parts

Awesome it's Time Cruisers R2!

[splatman]

Seeing the Han Solo in carbonite brick in the Rainbow D2 pic above, I thought, why not a R2D2 consisting of only Star Wars printed (or officially stickered) pieces wherever possible? Better yet, also built only of pieces from SW sets, except the R2D2 set.

[Aanchir]

I have kept my models color-coordinated for as long as I can remember. But with that said, some of my MOCs have had disorganized-looking color schemes, and it wasn't for lack of caring. It's easy for kids and even some adults to follow a sort of internal logic that other people might not understand when coloring their models. Just think about how many different colors of brown or gray a real object might have, and imagine designing something if you didn't understand what types of colors worked together in that way. It'd be easy to make a model with a dozen vibrant colors if those happen to be the colors you have and you want each color to represent a particular function or material.

Here's a model two other builders and I created for a LEGO building competition at my school last semester, using multiple Creator buckets. Here's our model from the second round of the competition. There are a lot of colors going on in both, but they are distributed for the best visual appeal. A kid isn't necessarily going to understand that how the colors are distributed is just as important as what colors you use, how many you use, and what you use them for. It is common to see kids' BIONICLE and Hero Factory creations where they start by limiting themselves to a color scheme — "This model will be green" — but then just start applying parts from their selected color palette willy-nilly, creating a model that is too organized to suggest a mottled or camouflage pattern and too disorganized to have understandable color layering. Typically, as in most cases, the smaller the model is, the less likely it is to have a completely chaotic color scheme. Even a kid who has a particular color scheme in mind will give himself more and more leeway as it becomes harder to find parts in those exact colors that suit his purposes.

Incidentally, even an adult who designs LEGO models for a profession can sometimes create a "rainbow warrior" with a logical system behind it that not everyone understands. For an example, take Voltix here. He was heavily criticized for having so many colors, but looking at him more closely you can understand his color scheme to a great extent. He's mainly red with titanium metallic armor. Thicker portions of his armor are Medium Lilac. With those three colors alone, you'd have a nice, three-color color scheme. However, that doesn't do his electrical motif justice. Thus, he needs a few blue and red wires and some yellow lightning weapons. A Transparent Fluorescent Green head is used for ideal contrast with the helmet and approximate consistency with his yellow lightning effects. Overall, I love his resulting color scheme. It has a sort of organized chaos to it, which suits a crazy electric villain like him. But others have disagreed, and it's rare to see a Voltix revamp that doesn't drop at least one of the colors entirely (the blue wires and yellow weapons are usually the first to go). Invariably, some of that original, quirky logic is lost as a result.

Edited May 16, 2013 by Aanchir

[Hrw-Amen]

I think though that there is a great difference between using multiple colors as a design choice, (Like in the Voltix episode Anchir has shown us.) and just randomly thrown together bricks of all colors which have no design attributed to that color scheme.

It seems though that in spite of one or two of us creating random creations most of us as children tried our best to build coherent models even if we did not have enough bricks to always pull it off as we would have liked.

I wonder if there is any correlation between those who used (Or try to use.) color coordination as children in building and those who went on to become AFOLs as opposed to those who just built haphazardly, who may not have become AFOLs? Obviously I do not know, but it would be interesting if one of those big polling companies who do polls for elections and things to run a survey to find out?

[CptPJs]

I got my first Lego at about four, and I had a lot because it was hand-me-down. If there wasn't the bricks to coordinate, I'd build something I could build. I did the stripey houses, red-yellow-blue-black-white, red-yellow-blue-black-whi OH, red, yellow, blue, red yellow blue, red yellow red red red okay this is a tall enough house now. My younger brother drove me absolutely mad because he'd use whatever colour came to hand and I tried to teach him, but he didn't care.

And there you go, yes I cared and I'm an AFOL, he didn't and he's not.

[ShaydDeGrai]

I guess I've always been a bit of an obsessive compulsive when it comes to my builds. I don't think I've ever done a "rainbow build" in my life (and I started with Lego back when you could count the number of available colors on one hand) The closest I come is randomly mixing old grey with new bley - and even then it's done deliberately to create weathered-rock effects.

To this day, I'm still a bit OCD with respect to gratuitous color mixing. I recall one MOC I was working on where I remarked to my wife that I was going to have to stop until I could get more brick because I'd run out of tan. She looked at the WIP and pointed out all (structural) the tan bricks in the middle that would never be seen in the final build. She said, "Can't you free up these and just do this inside stuff with those buckets of bright red you never use? No one will ever see them by the time your done." To which I relied, "True, but I'll know they're there."

[LEGO Historian]

Gee.... I had always wondered why British LEGO Ltd. produced the 1970 Weetabix promotional castle with so many colors.....

... maybe now I know!!

[Canticleer blues]

Like others have said, as a kid I too was likely to make multi-colored creations. Most of the time it wasn't out of choice. If I had the pieces, I would make coordinated-looking models, but being a kid with limited sets and pieces, I was perfectly okay with mixing colors. What mattered most to me was building what I envisioned, and if that meant having to use a larger range of colors, then I was prepared to do just that.

As I got older, I made more of an effort to build in one color. That often meant that if I didn't have enough pieces in, say, grey, I'd have to remake the model in blue or black, or whatever I had more of. This wasn't always an ideal solution though; sometimes I found myself frustrated with the result if lack of pieces in certain colors negatively impacted the build of my creation.

Now, as an adult who has access to Bricklink, I could theoretically order any parts in any color to make the creations I imagine. But that's not something I find myself doing all the time. Nowadays I usually make prototypes of builds to test the structure of the build and experiment with techniques. If everything checks out, I'll go back and fix the colors and/or order some pieces from Bricklink if I have to. It's really more due to economic reasons more than anything else- if I ordered parts in the colors I needed for a prototype model that doesn't work out, then it feels like I've wasting my resources. For someone like me who's trying to save money, it's wiser to build with what I have on hand than just place needless amounts of orders. Sure the concept models end up being quite colorful, but the finished models always look nicer because of it- and in the end that's what really matters in MOCmaking.

[Brickdoctor]

Gee.... I had always wondered why British LEGO Ltd. produced the 1970 Weetabix promotional castle with so many colors.....

[snip]

... maybe now I know!!

Well that particular model isn't a true 'rainbow MOC'. While it uses a lot of colors, they're all separated along divisions that make sense. That's sort of the position I was in*: I had plenty of bricks, not enough of each color to make one large model from one color, but at least each section or building or vehicle would have one color, and a color that made sense. (Ships would probably be black for lack of browns, castles would be yellow, fire stations would be red...) I guess it helped that I was originally a Town/City fan and I grew up with sets that were still on the smaller side, even if I wasn't old enough to ever have true Classic Town sets, so until I had more bricks, most of my buildings would just copy TLG's style with the open back, the smaller size, the prefab parts - things like that to cut corners and keep things to one color.

*I was probably in a little better position than most, as I had a few buckets of bricks from a (then) TFOL who was moving on but had kept his bricks in very good condition. (I say 'bricks' and not 'sets' because all the sets were disassembled and some pieces were missing, but the bricks were like-new.)

So the closest I've ever gotten to a rainbow MOC is...

I don't post 'rainbow' creations but I do build them, usually prototypes (purely functional), also for economical purpose, if I intend to build something large which would require a Bricklink order I want to know in advance which specific parts I'll need.

Interesting question by the way, I'm interested in what other people think as well.

...the ones I build now. I do the rainbow thing all the time when building prototypes or the support structure that won't be seen.

[Kivi]

There was always a shortage of bricks of the same colour when playing with lego as a child, so I mostly had no other option but building in rainbow mode. What I remember most is arranging 2x4 bricks in stripes when I built walls or castles or anything larger.

Nowadays the rainbow mocing is not really an issue, though I still build in multicoloured mode, but only the parts of the mocs that are invisible from outside, such as inner supports etc. Some prototypes are also built in rainbow style but then I replace the bricks with more suitable colours.