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.
