Today’s guest article about building with color comes from Steven W. Howard (aka Ghalad), a prolific MOC builder featured in the LEGO House Masterpiece Galley and a future LEGO set designer. All thoughts and opinions expressed in the article are his own.
What’s Your Color?
Every time I set out to do the Color Wheel Challenge, the song “Colors” by Stella Jang is ringing in my ear…
“What’s your color? I wanna know.
What’s your color? I wanna know.
What’s your color? I wanna know.
I wanna know.
I wanna know.
I wanna know.”
For two years in a row, I have completed a digital LEGO take on the popular art community challenge called the Color Wheel Challenge. What is that, you might ask? In the artist community, it involves creating a character or artwork for each color on a color wheel. This was quite popular on Twitter and YouTube in 2023.
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Personally, I was inspired by the LEGO set designer Wes Talbot (who has worked on sets like the recent Dungeons and Dragons), who was sharing a series of dragon paintings he was doing for the challenge on Instagram.
This caused me to consider what a LEGO version of this challenge might look like. Being a fellow nerd for all things fantasy-based, I set out to do something in the realm of Dungeons and Dragons.
Where To Start?
Whenever I tackle a project, whether it is with real or digital bricks, I will start writing down ideas on paper or in my phone’s notes app. For this particular challenge, I wanted each character to be unique yet have layers of elements that tie in the project as a whole. For example, the first color wheel had D&D characters (Bard, Wizard, Archer, etc.) but also each representing a different creature type: mammal, bird, fish, amphibian, reptile, etc. When it came to the 2nd color wheel, I had different flowers and different tasks for each robot. I believe that adding layers like this to your builds can provide deeper interest in what you create and a good way to stretch your imagination.
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While I am collecting ideas, I am also collecting references. I spend a lot of time on Instagram and save art, photos, and other relevant posts like flower arrangements or Warhammer and fantasy tabletop miniatures. Whether it is on Instagram, Pinterest, Google, or even real life, collecting what inspires you should be a practice we all participate in. You never know when you might find it useful to dig up that artwork you found of a squirrel knight half a year ago that could be your next LEGO MOC!
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After collecting ideas, it is time to start sketching! Sketching is an essential part of any creative endeavor I set out on. You might be intimidated by those of us who have been trained in the arts as our sketches sometimes might appear more refined than other people, but I honestly believe it isn’t the quality of your sketch but rather if a sketch can convey your idea clearly enough for yourself or those you work with or for. That is my purpose in sketching. It helps me in my process to see where I want to take an idea before committing it to the brick.
When it came to the Bots and Botanicals color wheel, sketching was crucial as I had less reference material (beyond the flowers) to work with. Without sketching, it would have been far more difficult to have a direction to take each robot.
Real or Digital
Once all the prep work is done, it is time to move on to the fun stuff- building LEGO! But we need to pause and talk about something first: Digital LEGO.
Even after all these years, digital LEGO is still a bit of a controversial thing. I have been creating in the medium since 2018. Back then, my wife was pregnant with our first kid, and we were living in a small apartment in California with a small bin of my originally massive collection of bricks. I had few parts to work with and limited time. Even still, I wanted to submit an idea for LEGO Ideas- the NASA Gemini space capsule (which actually made it to 10k supporters on the platform), plus various other challenges LEGO had offered at the time. Digital building afforded me the chance to build with bricks I did not have to offer ideas I would otherwise not be able to achieve.
I was working at the time as a senior technical illustrator and 3D animator for a satellite and spacecraft company called Space Systems Loral (now known as MAXAR Space Systems). It was there that I learned how to do 3D modeling and animation in Strata 3D and Cinema 4D. These skills lent their hand toward my approach of digital building and helped me adapt quickly to LEGO Digital Designer and then to BrickLink Studio.
Like many who build digitally, I initially only used the rendering capabilities of the native software like BrickLink Studio. But being the artist that I am, I was never quite satisfied with the quality of what those platforms could offer, and I wanted to go further and even animate my works from time to time.
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Take a look at a few examples here of the difference between a Studio render and what can be done with software like Blender, Unreal Engine, or in this case, Cinema 4D with Octane renderer and Greyscale Gorilla lighting.
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Here is where I think digital building gets a lot of its negative pushback. If you’ve been an AFOL for any amount of time, you will have likely run into those who see digital building as “less than” or “not real LEGO” and dismiss it outright. You might even be one of those people. LDD, Studio, and Mecabricks (the three leading digital LEGO platforms) have pretty basic render engines, and the quality of those final shots of your MOC can only ever be pushed so far in-program. In a way, this is the uncanny valley of LEGO building.
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On top of this, you can do things digitally that are not necessarily possible with real bricks… but here is where I would contend against that- I have seen builders whose real, physical MOCs could fall apart if you breathed on them wrong, some were drilled together with wood and screws in the back, others glued, and a vast majority of MOCs you see online are photoshopped with props and wires edited out- in a way its own category of “digital” building you might say. All that to say, the argument that you can’t build it in real life is old and tired and a pretty weak place to stand on. I don’t hear a single AFOL complaining that the entirety of every LEGO movie ever made is 100% digital and somehow those builds aren’t legit.
Ok, rant aside haha- when it comes to my personal approach, why do I choose to build with real bricks sometimes and digital bricks other times? Simply put, it is all about time, scale, part availability, exploration, and animation.
Digital LEGO has allowed me to explore new part connections, often when I can’t justify spending $200+ USD for a new set, yet I know I’d love to see how certain pieces could be used. Sometimes I don’t have the time or space to create an overly massive spaceship or character. For the color wheel challenge, it was about color. I currently have a large collection of bricks, but not a lot of the color variety that such a challenge demands.
From the outset, I knew this would be done digitally. Also, in pairing with my YouTube channel, Digitally Assembled, I wanted to continue to highlight my process as a digital builder.
Creating the Builds
For this article, I want to walk you through some of the builds in both color wheels simultaneously. The D&D wheel was created in January of 2023, with each build being done in 20 hours or less, while the Bots and Botanicals was created in February of 2024, and each build was done in less than 10 hours. Each of these color wheels was done in order, starting with Orange.
Orange
As with most of my character and creature builds, whether digital or real, I start with the area we all most connect with—the eyes. It takes a few iterations, but after some messy Studio building, I arrive at the eyes I want (in this case, using some ball and socket joints), and this sets the scale of the rest of the Red Panda Prince build.
As this is the first in the series, it also sets the feel and look of all other builds to follow. I could have pursued something more cartoony and expressive, but I wanted to ride the line of realism and fantasy. The Red Panda Prince was quite flexible in my creative process as I decided where to take him.
For all of these builds, I would design the build in BrickLink Stud.io first and then use Autodesk’s FBX converter to take the exported .collada file and convert it into a readable format in Cinema4D. From there, I had to recolor/retexture the entire build, converting the BrickLink colors into proper-looking plastic colors. I would do this using Rylie Howerter’s invaluable online LEGO color resource. Their list has all the available hex codes, which I use in all my digital builds when it comes time to recoloring.
I then use Greyscale Gorilla’s Light Kit to light up my scene in 3D and Octane’s render engine to render out my scene.
From there, it is just some simple Photoshop work to polish the image and crop it into the color wheel in an interesting way.
For the Firebot, I restricted myself to matching my original sketch as closely as possible.
YeLlow
After rewatching one of my favorite films, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, for the fifth time, I had to include an Aarakocra (eagle humanoid) like Jarnathan from the movie. An eagle fit really well with the yellow color with its prominent yellow beak. It was here that I realized and became determined to create separate creature and character types for the first color wheel.
With the eyes being so large, it made the entire MOC much larger than anticipated and made making the cowl’s hood a particular challenge.
For the Guardian Bot of the Sunflower, the main driver for this model was the flower more than the robot itself, and what better flower for yellow than a sunflower?
Green
Moving on to green, we come to two of the most popular entries of both my color wheels… they were also the quickest.
If you’ve been in the LEGO community long enough, odds are you have run into or heard of Simon Liu, our frog-obsessed fellow AFOL. I chat online with him quite often, asking for input and advice on the progress of my builds. This was an opportunity to give a nod to my friend by making Simon the Samurai!
This build showcases more than others one of the more challenging and often frustrating aspects of digital building, which are “flexibles.” Flexibles are pieces like tubing, hoses, and chains. It takes tremendous patience and multiple attempts to get a piece of tubing where you want it, but the great advantage of this (in a digital build) is that it adds a layer of realism and a more organic feel. If you want to bring life to your digital creation, I suggest adding flexibles. Just calm yourself in preparation because it won’t be easy!
The crab was by far the fastest build, only taking 2.8 hours in total (that includes building, exporting the file to Cinema 4D via Autodesk’s Collada to FBX converter, retexturing, and rendering, plus final Photoshop work). While the frog took only four hours, the crab was quite simple in its overall design. (How do I know how long these took, by the way, you may ask? For the purpose of my YouTube channel, I screen recorded everything and was able to look back at how long it took for each build.)
Azure
Peter the Piper Pit Viper initially was perhaps the most challenging out of all the color wheel builds. At first, wanting him to be a bard, I was trying to think of how to have a snake play a lute, but ended up settling on a flute instead.
Once I sketched that out, I had to figure out a way to create the scales. I pored over images of Donny Chen’s incredible Golden Dragon that had just come out. After chatting online with him, I discovered we used a fairly similar technique to create the scaling of our creatures. After solving my scale issue, it was simply just a copy-paste method to create the rest of the snake. If only building multiples of an assembly were so simple in real life!
The Policebot was inspired by Wall-E. I liked the simple shapes and light-heartedness of the robot designs. Doing so allowed me to focus more energy on creating the Muscari flowers. As an added bonus to digital building, I only had to create one Muscari and could then duplicate it in Cinema 4D to achieve the composition I wanted for the final shot.
Blue
Tang the Sea Barbarian took some liberties with my original design language. The creature I based it on is almost entirely in the head. Arms coming out of the fish would have looked weird, so I created a few sketches to figure out what Tang would look like before building her.
Throughout her build, I tried to add little nautical nods like a manta ray on the sword and octopi on the shield.
Bonkle is life… so say many in the AFOL community I follow and am friends with. I grew up on the OG Bionicles, so for the bot, I set out to do an upscaled Gali (the water Toa). I spent the most time on getting the mask just right and had built it in three different scales until I settled on what felt right.
Purple
For purple, both builds were quite simple—and this was intentional. When taking on a massive project like this, it is always best to plan ahead and pace yourself. Not only did I want variety in scale, but for my own sanity, not every build needed to be large with thousands upon thousands of parts.
The beetle satisfied the need for an insect in the lineup. Using a few sloped pieces with doors for wings (how I wish they were transparent in real life), I had a mini-archer on hand!
For the Wild Bergamot Deliverybot, I wanted to strike a balance for my robots by having a few light-hearted and cute robots contrasted with the more serious bots like Gali and the Firebot. Robots come in various shapes and forms, and not all need feet. Adding some tank treads was refreshing to the group.
Pink
The last creature category to satisfy was a mollusk (an octopus). To create the wizard hat, I used the same technique as the shield for the barbarian using an array of hinged plates.
For the robot wheel, I felt that creating a more creature-like bot was necessary. To speed up and simplify my process, I reused the fox head from my Sir Fenrick the Fox for Brickscalibur digital build (pictured earlier in this article).
Some might say it is cheating, but I think it is always fair game to reuse a part of an old build you have done, whether in real life or digitally. I altered it enough to make the fox look robotic. I am quite happy with how the foxgloves turned out using a minifigure helmet to achieve the look of the bulbs.
Red
Completing the wheel, we have red. For the D&D wheel, I returned to the mammal category by creating a Red Ruffed Shaman Lemur. I probably had the most fun on this build due to how unique it was. I had an opportunity to create a panther skull, melted candles, and a face-painted lemur!
And lastly, we come to The Rhythm, the Robot, and the Rose. As far as the rose goes, it is an exact replica of the LEGO set (why fix what’s not broken?). The robot itself has a special nod to my future home with its color scheme of red and white.
Wheels of Color
While writing this article, I am in the midst of preparations to move to Denmark to start work as a product designer at LEGO for the 18+ line of sets starting in August 2025. I created my second color wheel challenge in the midst of interviews to get the designer job. Here is that completed color wheel:
I had always intended to do another color wheel challenge, but was originally planning to do a series of Orcs. I switched course and created the Bots and Botanicals wheel specifically with the purpose of strengthening my MOC portfolio with some botanicals, hopefully showcasing my versatility as a designer.
Here you can see my first color wheel experiment to compare it to my newest one. The last robot was a nod to Denmark.
I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into my creative process, work as a digital builder, and what it looks like to take on a challenge like the color wheel. It might seem daunting to many, but I do hope others consider endeavoring to do their own color wheel challenge. It really helps stretch you as a builder, and you will come out on the other side feeling more creative and skilled.
If you like, you can check out both videos I have made regarding the color wheels to get even more of a deep dive into how I created these. Until next time, I hope you find ways to keep yourself creatively challenged and fresh in your work.
Have you been inspired to build by a specific LEGO color? Let us know in the comments below!
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