Color palette: crying out for Brick Red

[Hrafn]

I am sure there are many ways to do it, but this is the way I make sense of the current solid colors (other than those mostly devoted to skin tones). Dark, Saturated, Light, Pastel, Brick, Sand, and Fluorescent are the way I think of the rows. This makes Reddish Orange the “true” (saturated) orange, and Bright Light Orange the “true” yellow. Brown and Dark Brown don’t quite fit into the structure.

I am really appreciative of the extensive modern color palette, having grown up with the very limited palette of the 80s - but looking at these colors makes me really wish we had a Brick Red color (similar to Tan / Brick Yellow and Medium Blue in terms of saturation and lightness) so we could build realistic brick buildings. Pastel Green would be nice, to add more foliage colors, and Light Red (like Coral but not fluorescent) could be handy as well.

How do you organize the colors, and what key gaps do you see in the current palette?

Edited October 25, 2024 by Hrafn

[Murdoch17]

Once upon a time, for a very short window we did have sand red @Hrafn. Then the great color purge of 2003 took it away from us and we need it back. The color was mostly available in service packs, and my dad actually did build a building from it way back then. (It was built before he discovered Bricklink, so it uses only parts he had or could get from LEGO directly) See spoiler tag if you're interested in how it looks.

Spoiler

 

Behold! the sand red factory! It's hollow on the inside, and doesn't have an interior.

The rear.

 

 

[Hrafn]

Thanks @Murdoch17. Sand red would be nice to have back but I would also like a less pink version to replicate the way most bricks look, especially in my New England town full of old mill buildings. 

[Stereo]

I'd probably put teal and medium azure in different columns, I'm not sure if dark azure is closer to that or blue though.

 

I agree on adding desaturated red, other than that I'd like something between Blue and Dark Blue, though maybe if I had enough Dark Azure in my collection I could be convinced that Blue already fits that space.  I just don't feel like "royal blue" is quite present, dark blue is too dark.

 

I think I'd maybe argue that Reddish Brown, Dark Purple, Dark Red, and Dark Orange are in an intermediate 'dark' while Dark Brown, Dark Green, and Dark Blue are the next step that way.  Dark orange is really more in the stone orange class though, while medium nougat is stone brown.

Edited October 25, 2024 by Stereo

[Hrafn]

@Stereocould you explain what you mean by “stone” for nougat and dark orange? I organized the colors that way because I think Dark Orange is saturated while Nougat is desaturated.

I agree that some Dark colors are darker than others, but no hue/column has both kinds of dark so I kept them all in one row (except for the browns, which I don’t think fit in any of the 9 hues).

The blue-green colors are definitely less consistent with one another than the other hues are. Having 9 hue columns does sort of align with Cyan/Magenta/Yellow from the CMYK scheme, since those three are evenly spaced.

[Aanchir]

7 hours ago, Murdoch17 said:

Once upon a time, for a very short window we did have sand red @Hrafn. Then the great color purge of 2003 took it away from us and we need it back. The color was mostly available in service packs, and my dad actually did build a building from it way back then. (It was built before he discovered Bricklink, so it uses only parts he had or could get from LEGO directly) See spoiler tag if you're interested in how it looks.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Behold! the sand red factory! It's hollow on the inside, and doesn't have an interior.

The rear.

 

 

There also used to be a color literally called Brick Red — but it was never used for basic bricks outside of Modulex or some test bricks from Bayer (the company that used to provide the LEGO Group with their colored plastic granulate, back before TLG switched to mixing dyes and colorless granulate in house). It's the color that BrickLink calls "Fabuland Brown" for System parts or "Terracotta" for Modulex parts. You can see a photo of some of the parts produced in this color here.

[Stereo]

2 hours ago, Hrafn said:

@Stereocould you explain what you mean by “stone” for nougat and dark orange? I organized the colors that way because I think Dark Orange is saturated while Nougat is desaturated.

Oh, I got confused by the names again. "stone" is the darker desaturated, "sand" is the lighter desaturated colours.  Just based on the rows. Looking again yours has 'brick' for the dark ones and I think Lego sometimes calls them 'earth' (though iirc Dark Green is Earth Green and Green is Dark Green, officially?)

 

I can see the argument that Dark Orange is fully saturated, with Reddish Brown being the same colour even darker and also saturated.  So maybe what I'd have is Dark Brown, Reddish Brown, Dark Orange, Reddish Orange, Orange, as a stack above the 'bright'.  And then align the other colours based on that, since none of them have so many shades.

Edited October 25, 2024 by Stereo

[Murdoch17]

2 hours ago, Stereo said:

Oh, I got confused by the names again. "stone" is the darker desaturated, "sand" is the lighter desaturated colours.  Just based on the rows. Looking again yours has 'brick' for the dark ones and I think Lego sometimes calls them 'earth' (though iirc Dark Green is Earth Green and Green is Dark Green, officially?)

 

I can see the argument that Dark Orange is fully saturated, with Reddish Brown being the same colour even darker and also saturated.  So maybe what I'd have is Dark Brown, Reddish Brown, Dark Orange, Reddish Orange, Orange, as a stack above the 'bright'.  And then align the other colours based on that, since none of them have so many shades.

Bricklink's Bright Green is LEGO Green. Bricklink's Green is LEGO Dark Green. Bricklink's Dark Green is LEGO Earth Green. Examples of these colors are: Current standalone baseplates sold as Green by TLG, but are actually what fans call bright green with misleading packaging. The Emerald Night (set 10194) steam loco is Dark Green / Earth Green. One-piece cypress trees of ye olde times were Green to us fans, but Dark green to LEGO.

Confused yet @Stereo? (I think typing this post with the word green so many times made the word green loose all meaning to me.)

Edited October 25, 2024 by Murdoch17

[Hrafn]

@Stereo how about this? It does make orange/brown seem really dominant. Which makes the limited red selection look even sadder.