Brickaizer has the option to use Standard Colours, instead of limiting yourself to the brick and Ministeck colours. Although bricks have hundreds of colours, not all bricks are available in the colour you need, and some colours are hard to get by, or too expensive for the amount that you require in the mosaic.

The Standard Colours require one additional step before you build your quite realistic brick mosaic: you need to apply a (spray)paint coating on the brick before putting it on the building plates. Commercially available spraypaints are typically following a standard colour scheme, reliable and repeatable. Some of these Standard Colours are globally available, and sometimes regionally (like Australian Standard AS2700 or British Standard Colours). Especially RAL (Europe) and FS 595 (USA) are widely available in DYI shops.

Lesson 1: My preparations for a Standard Colour mosaic

The first thing you need to do is to create the Standard Colour data set. Fortunately we have already provided a few, but since most colour standards are copyrighted, we can only include a slightly off-value data set and avoid unnecessary lawsuits. The structure of the Standard Colour data set is provided in the chapter on dataset structure (here ). For now you can probably use the as-is data set from our installation files. In case you like to make your own dataset: this website may be very helpful to derive the real and accurate colour codes ('Colourcharts'). We used the source code of the colour pages to quickly derive the colour code, RGB values and the colour description. Legal and accurate :-)

The second thing you need to do is to check which colours are commercially available in your local DYI shop. In case you don't want to limit yourself... no problem, just order the spraypaints online. Should not be so hard. One can will probably be as cheap as 3 Euro, so a pack of 32 colours will cost less than 100 Euro. Much cheaper than buying special bricks and colours via Bricklink or similar websites for brick sales. If you are done with checking, prune the dataset such that only the colours remain which you can actually purchase. There is no need to keep colours in a set you won't be able to buy or only with great effort or at high cost. Save this file and (re)check if the data structure is precisely according to the provided examples.

Lastly, as a preparation start the application and follow these steps to activate the Standard Colour set (we will use the RAL Classic in this tutorial):

• Start Brickaizer. It will start using the last used (normal) dataset.
• Select via the main menu 'Special functions' > 'Paintbrush colours'. This will open a new (small) window.
• Select from the pull-down box the RAL Classic data set. It will show the individual colours, but not the colour dots in the overview on top because it's not yet active.
• To activate the Standard Colour feature, simply click on the still empty area, now only showing a text 'Click here to activate the Standard colours' and press the 'Yes' button (a warning will pop-up first). The Standard Colour set will now become active, the overview in the previous window is now shown, and the colour list in the main application windows now also shows all the standard colours. In the status bar you will notice that the 'Colour set: RAL Classic' is now the active set. Basically the full data set has now been replaced by the Standard Colours set.
• You can now safely close the pop-up window. You don't need these any more as a preparation.

Picture: during lesson 1 you should now see the above windows.

Lesson 2: My first Standard Colour mosaic

This is the easiest step: press the 'Create mosaic' button and wait until the mosaic is finished. This may take a while since there are quite a number of colours to choose from, and optimize the mosaic. Our size in this example is 56 x70 studs. and it took about 4 seconds to complete the mosaic. You will get a warning about the number of colours are too much for a proper output in the excel result file. This is the corresponding screenshot:

Despite the high amount of colours the RAL Classic standard is providing quite a good palette to make a very realistic portrait. Especially skin colours are hard to create with brick colours, so RAL spraypaint can be a good alternative.

Lesson 3: Reducing the number of colours

You won't probably want to keep a stock of 92 colours, so you need to bring the amount of colours drastically down, without sacrificing too much of the quality of the mosaic. There are two methods (like a normal mosaic, but here it pays off to use this feature)

1. Press the Colour matching button again, and select a decent number of colours. We choose 24 as the 'Limit to # of colours'.
2. As 1, but now also tick the checkbox 'Iterate down to exact # of colours'.

We will demonstrate the two options by first do option 1, wait for result, and then use option 2. Make sure you always first press the 'Reset colours' button before making a new mosaic. The picture below shows the two results. The picture on the left is the calibration result from our unrestricted use of colours mosaic.

As can be seen from this picture the iterative reduction is resulting in a better overall quality compared with the quick colour reduction. Differences are seen in e.g. the eyes (less contrast) and hair (less vivid). Especially with skin tones this effect is noticeable : almost as good as the unrestricted colour approach. For other, less colour sensitive pictures this may not be so outspoken. The difference in speed is quite different though: fast reduction was a fast as unrestricted, while the iteration took 16 steps to complete, about 90 seconds in total.

Lesson 4: Saving and reuse

The last step in making perfect mosaics with standard colours is to save the result and the corresponding colour set. Basically, you can treat the standard colours as any other table of colours and bricks. The standard colours have no brick restrictions, so all the colour-brick combinations are possible. To see this in action, open the table editor by pressing the 'Edit table' button. Now you can see that all the colours and bricks are fully applicable. The default selection is a brick with 1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 1x4, 1x6, 1x8, 2x2, 2x3, 2x4, 2x6 and 2x8 studs.

The quickest way to save the current used set of colours and bricks is to press the 'Copy used' in the Editor window. This will uncheck all the colours that were not used in the current mosaic. We ran step 3 again, not with 36 colours, to keep a couple of extra colours at hand when we want to play with the number of colours later on. We also deselected all bricks except 1x1 and 2x2. With these two you can make every mosaic in the world, and these two bricks are plentiful and cheap to buy on the internet. Then we saved the table as 'Skintones'. After saving the news set is loaded; in the main window you can now also see the selected colours. All the non-used colours have been omitted and what remains is a perfectly new table with a selection of paints colours suitable for painting this source picture. In the screenshot below is what you will see when all the explained steps are followed correctly.

The new set is now available as a true (normal) table with bricks and colours. Next time you want to create a mosaic from a similar picture that requires skin tones, you can now safely use this set of selected colours. The final check you should now make is to assure that all the spraypaint colours in the palette are commercially available and for a decent price. When you would have preselected such a set, then this last step is not needed.

Epilogue: What else is there to do?

The use of the standard colour data files is a very powerful approach to combine any kind of colour that you want. You can create a mixed pallet from two different standards (if available as spraypaint, or as paintbrush paint, or any other means to recolour a brick). You might even want to combine brick colours with standard colours to reuse your current set of bricks. But when doing so the brick colours are then defaulted to the 11 types of bricks. You might need to manually deselect the non-existent colour-bricks combinations in the Colour table editor. But once done is remain applicable for many projects.

Alternatively you can make works of art by selecting a different colour engine (e.g. black and white, just two colours are required) or applying this set as a Ministeck® table (you should then have saved as 'Save table as Ministeck').

Basically any other creative step is possible, because the saved table is identical to any other (normal) colour-brick table.