Monochrome update & Disney CMF

A lot of new monochrome minifigure colors have become available since the last update! The availability chart has been updated to include these changes.

There may also be a new figure to be added very shortly. Lego has released images of a new themed Collectible Minifigures line, and it appears from these images that a Dark Purple (Medium Lilac, in Lego's terminology) minifigure head will be available for the first time. It will need to be wiped, but this is then the last part needed to complete that color of monochrome minifig.

The head is for Buzz Lightyear.



Although monochrome lovers are excited by the possibility of a new complete color, I'd say there is much more to be excited about for this new CMF line overall. There are several figures on here that I will want to collect. It's a little disappointing to see another Toy Story alien since these have been in a few sets already, but in my opinion that's the only weak figure in the whole line.


See the Monochrome Minifigure Availability Chart.

BrickLink Trends: Daily Orders in March 2016

If you buy Lego online, odds are that you've heard of BrickLink, which is a marketplace for independent sellers to offer their sets, minifigures, and parts for sale.

One of the interesting things about BrickLink is that when each new order is placed, it gets assigned the next available order number, so it's very easy to see how many orders get placed across the entire site. I have been tracking this data for a while now. Every month, I update a chart which shows how many orders are being placed. The trend over the last few years has been of tremendous growth. Below is a snapshot, current up to the end of March, 2016.



This shows the average number of orders that are placed each day on BrickLink. In March, there was an average of 3753 orders placed each day. BrickLink has thousands of sellers, so even the largest of them doesn't get a lot more than 10 or 20 orders per day. But the chart shows the total orders across all of those individual stores. It works out to an order every 23 seconds in March.

March was a significant drop from February, but this is a normal trend that happens every year. January typically sees the most daily orders of any month, and this year that was certainly the case, with a record-breaking average of 4299 orders placed each day. We should see the daily totals continue to drop until the summer, when they will start to gradually climb back up again through the rest of the year.

As you can see from the chart, each year's numbers are higher than the same month for every previous year. The only time that this year-over-year growth wasn't sustained was in 2013.

March of this year saw an increase of 21% over March of 2015. This was a little lower than I had anticipated -- the grey line on the graph shows my projections for each months numbers (which I put up in January), based on previous years' trends.

What I do not currently track is the actual value of the orders placed. With just the order numbers, there is no way to know whether the actual total revenue is increasing in proportion to the number of orders placed. It's possible that the size of each order has changed over the years. The chart also doesn't take into account that some of these orders get cancelled -- all orders on the site get counted, regardless of whether they end up being completed or not (such as orders cancelled for non-payment). BrickLink has previously published some statistics which indicate that approximately 3% of orders end up being cancelled or otherwise not completed. (Though, these stats are several years old and may have changed somewhat since then.)

If you run a BrickLink store, you may see some similar trends to the chart in the sales patters of your store (higher sales around November to February and lower sales around May to August), but keep in mind that most stores will differ greatly from the overall trend. You may see two or three orders a day for a few weeks, and then no orders at all for several days in a row, regardless of the month. This type of variation is completely normal. The trends in the chart only start to become apparent and predictable at very large scales.

You can always find an updated version of the chart here.

Dark Bluish Gray (Dark Stone Gray) Torso is Now in Sets

Minifigure torsos with prints on them have been available in Dark Bluish Gray (Dark Stone Gray) for years, so anyone who has been willing to wipe the print off has been able to make a monochrome minifig in that color. For the non-wiping purists, though, this part is now officially available in an unprinted version.

The part comes from a new Ewok figure (Teebo) from set 10236 (Ewok Village). This brings the "Official" count for monochrome minifigs up to 15.

image from brickset

I have updated the Monochrome Minifig Availability Chart with the existence of this newest part.

Monochrome Minifig availability chart

I have added a chart that lists all of the possible monochrome minifigs: availability chart. The chart will be updated as new colors become possible, and it is set up to always show on the side menu.

Right now, it is just a list, but as I update it, each color will link to a page that shows what sets and minifigures the parts come from, to help anyone looking to assemble the figures for themselves. If you have any suggestions about what other information you'd like to see on the chart, let me know.

If you are interested in monochrome minifigs, but want to get the component parts from one place, feel free to visit my Lego stores on BrickLink (FigBits) or BrickOwl (Monochrome).

Monochrome Minifig Primer

Minifigures are an extremely popular part of many Lego sets and collections. Some people only like official minifigs, which have been released in Lego sets. Others enjoy minifigure customization -- creating unofficial figures by using decals, paints, and even sculpting new parts.

Monochrome minifigs lie somewhere between these two extremes -- they do not appear in any official Lego sets, but they are assembled from standard parts. Specifically -- parts that have no printing on them, so that a figure is composed of a solid color.

Dark Red, Reddish Brown, and Tan Monochrome Minifigs

Among monochrome collectors, some are "purists" who will only use parts that have never had a print on them, while others are satisfied to erase the print from a printed part, in order to get the blank part that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Lego has come close, a few times, to making such figures officially:

The figurehead on the front of the Black Pearl, in set 4184, has an unprinted torso assembly and head, but doesn't have standard minifig legs. Strangely (to me), Lego doesn't treat the figure as one of the actual minifigures in the set. Maybe that's not so strange, since it's meant to represent a sculpture instead of a person.

Other near-appearances of monochrome minifigs in official Lego sets have also been of sculptures: the White Queen in Chamber of the Winged Keys (4704), the Gryffindor statue from Hogwart's Castle (4709), and the snowman from the 2013 City Advent Calendar.

[Edit: A reader also brought to my attention the statue from this year's Town Square set. A nearly complete monochrome fig! Just the hands are mismatched. Thanks for the heads-up, Miro!)


Probably the best looking near-miss is the VIP keychain that some customers of Lego Shop@Home received as a thank-you gift. All the parts are Chrome Red, except for the hands, which aren't chromed. (And, of course, it has a pin through the whole thing, like all the keychains.)

I was pretty disappointed that I was not among the people who received this freebie. I think that I have helped to build up a lot of interest in monochrome figs through my store on BrickLink (FigBits). I think I was also the first person to systematically catalog what figures are possible to be made. I uploaded the results as an Excel file on dropbox: Monochrome, (and there's an availability chart that summarizes the the possible figures, here on Them's The Bricks). Oh well -- I guess Lego wasn't really aware of that!

Meanwhile, over on Lego Cuusoo (where fans can suggest sets for Lego to make), a few users have submitted suggestions for monochrome minifig sets. I like the one that makes them look like a box of crayons. But, really, I think that I would be a bit disappointed if Lego made these figures really easy to acquire en masse.

A lot of the fun of putting together monochrome minifigs, for me at least, is the hunt for the rare parts, and scanning for parts in new colors in upcoming releases. The rarest of them all are medium blue hands, which have only ever appeared in the Watto minifigure from back in 2001. That minifig sells for around $100, so the hands are hard to get hold of. I don't have any personally, because for me they are just too expensive. At one time I did have four of them in my BrickLink store, which I sold for between $35 and $40 per hand.

But collecting monochromes doesn't have to break the bank. With the release of Series 11 of the Collectible Minifigures, two new colors of hands became available: Bright Light Blue, and Dark Pink. So if you had all the previous parts, you can now finish those figures for three or four dollars -- assuming that you can identify the Yeti (or the scientist) and the Female Robot by touch, through the Series 11 packaging! (The Bright Light Blue figure is only possible if you are willing to wipe the print off of some legs and torsos. The Dark Pink is completely available with official unprinted parts, although they're also pretty rare.)

Some people do like to save the trouble of getting the parts from multiple sources, though. I cater to those fans in my online stores, and have recently added entire figures to my Monochrome store on BrickOwl.


If you are a fan of monochrome minifigs, feel free to comment and post a link to images of your collection. You can also check back on this blog as I will be posting whenever new monochrome parts become available.