Yeargh!

[swestrup]

Now I know why I never tried to make the models that Lego kits always give instructions for. My color perception is bad. The colors in the book don't match the colors in the photographs, which don't match the colors on the bricks, which don't have consistent colors. So, I'm halfway through a bug and discover I need ANOTHER hinged green thing, but there aren't any more. So, maybe what I thought were suposed to be green were black? 20 minutes later I find that that theory doesn't work either, because some other brick is not found. Worse, I've just discovered a case where two bricks that appear identical in color in the manual (they actually abut) cannot possibly be the same color, because both shapes don't exist in any one color in the set! Of course, I had to go online to find an actual inventory of the set to prove this to myself. So, I currently don't know of any way to build the bug I'm working on, without just ignoring all of the color info. But if I do that, why build the thing?

Maybe I'll go back to what I always did as a kid: make up a tentacled, bug-eyed creature from whole cloth and to hell with a color scheme....

(And _sps_, I don't want you to take the above as some sort of condemntation of your gift. It is appreciated. I just sometimes wish I could see colors properly...)

Comments

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

If you had theatre lighting gels, could you use those to differentiate the colours?

[swestrup]

Well, it might help me tell when colors in the book were supposed to be distinct, but it would not help me know which colors they are supposed to be, because they are not even close to the actual colors of the bricks...

[sps.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see, the problem is (part of the problem is) that the recent proliferation of LEGO colours - while way cool visually - has hugely exacerbated the problem of the pictures of the colours being distinct from the colours themselves. There's nothing wrong with my colour vision, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to interpret the instruction books myself, and friends have reported the same thing.

Now Sti is *officially* faced with orange, brown, red, pink, and two shades of green that likely all fall into a tight range for him, plus the pictures of all those colours, plus the variants of the colours for two or three different plastics (which are tight matches in 'normal' colour vision, but I doubt they are spectrally identical) - and, of course, the print colour process is different from the dyes in the bricks even if the bricks tried to be colour matched to the instructions, which they don't....

Probably even the gels wouldn't help very much.

What he said.

[swestrup]

When I first got the box opened, I sorted the pieces by color. This was not too dificult because they are pretty distinct. However I ended up lumping all of the Yellow and Orange together because I find them hard to tell apart unless they are side by side. I never even knew (until I printed out the inventory from the net -- didn't they once include those in lego boxes?) that there were any Dark Grey tiles. They just looked like a slight variation on the Dark Green, and were so categorized. (I did notice a bunch of Dark Grey shaft caps, but they are, to my eyes, a vastly different color from the Dark Grey tiles.)

That said, I find that the book's colors used for yellow, orange and lime are indistinguishable, and the colors used for Brown, Black and Green are very hard to tell apart. There is also one color which I have yet to see used in any model, and I'm wondering if its color is also indistinguishable to me from some other in the book.

Anyway, it turns out that the inventory is a major help, and I'm able to complete the modules much faster now. You know, if they just included a color key in the manuals it would help quite a bit...