12/21/2025
I've found several points she makes here to be true. Food for thought! I hope everyone's chosen projects are coming along well.
First Build, Then Paint? Wrong! LONG READ WARNING☝️Debunking nonsense requires more words than the nonsense itself.
There is an old saying among poultry breeders: ‘First build, then paint.’ The meaning is straightforward: establish correct type first, body shape, carriage, comb, size, all the structural parts, and only afterward concern yourself with feather colour.
Get the architecture right, then worry about the decorative finish.
First build, then paint may sound sensible... for a building. Type involves many polygenic traits that are difficult to fix and colour is often controlled by fewer genes with clearer inheritance patterns. Type is the foundation and colour is merely cosmetic, is the idea. So why not sort out the difficult stuff first?
> A chicken is not a building
Genetics isn't the same as constructing a building. If you follow this 'advice', you could end up losing a decade, lots of money and more important: chicken lives if you as a breeder KILL the ones you don’t select for next year. It's almost as if the poultry breeders are trying to set up beginners for failure with this saying
> afraid of competition? Use your brain and stick your fingers in your ears, here's why...
> No infinite time and birds
Breeders do not work with infinite time and infinite birds. Every generation, you select for the next. Every bird you choose to breed from, and every bird you choose not to breed from, will change the gene variations in your flock(s).
If you ignore colour for 5 generations while you ‘build type’, what happens to your colour genes? They drift. Randomly or worse. You actively select against them without realising it, because the birds with the best type happen just as often not to carry the colour genetics you need.
By the time type is fixed, you may discover that the colour genes you needed have been lost entirely from your lines of chickens. Or they have become so rare, scattered across individuals that otherwise lack quality, that reassembling them into a single chicken is another decade's work. You did not save time, you doubled it.
> The linkage trap
Colour genes do not float around independently of everything else . They are located on certain positions on the chromosomes, and those chromosomes carry other genes nearby. When you select a bird, you are not selecting single genes, you are selecting stretches of chromosomal segments.
Suppose a bird with excellent type happens to carry the wrong colour genes, or is lacking them. You breed from it heavily because of its good type. Its genes spread through your population. You are now dragging those wrong colour genes or multiply the absense of the needed colour genes along throughout time, when they are linked to the very type genes you wanted.
You may inadvertently create linkage disequilibrium between your desired type traits and the wrong or absent colour genes. The better your type becomes, the harder it gets to find some ‘right colour’, because the two have become negatively associated in your population. Breaking that (wrong) linkage requires generations of careful recombination and selection, generations you would not have needed if you had focussed on all traits from the start.
> Feather colour is not cosmetic
The saying treats colour as if it is ‘paint’, a superficial finish applied to the real work. Colour is as much a breed characteristic as body shape. A light Brahma is defined by its columbian pattern as surely as by its body type, size, feathered legs and eyebrows. A bird with perfect Brahma type and wrong colour is not a light Brahma. It only has a good type, not a true breeding (even new) colour.
> On breed standards
Colour varieties were established through generations of selective breeding. Often they were used for marketing purposes of the breed before the 1950s when the double purpose breeds were replaced by only meat and only laying hybrids.
In the hobby, treating feather colours as an afterthought disrespects history and misunderstands what a standardised breed actually is.
To me personally there is nothing wrong with a new colour not mentioned in breed standards for a specific breed, that’s called creative breeding. Otherwise we would have been stuck with only a few colours since the first written standards.
The conservative approach to breeding is the correct type and colour a established in the standard, or the colour is new to the breed and warrants acceptance. Even if you want to create a new colour on an established breed like Brahma or Wyandotte, you need to work on both type and colour at the same time.
This explanation works for all three of these things: conservation, restoration and creative breeding.
Colour genetics can be surprisingly complex in practice. Multiple genes interact to create a given colour pattern. Modifying the genes affects the gene expressions.
Getting the colour ‘right’ is not a matter of introducing one or two genes. It requires assembling also ‘invisible’ gene products that direct the gene expressions and fixing these new combinations.
> The practical alternative
The better approach is parallel selection from the start. Set minimum thresholds for both the breed’s traits and colour in every generation. Do not accept a bird for breeding because it has excellent type if it lacks essential colour genetics. Also, don't choose a bird to breed from just because it has the right colour, if it's not good in other ways.
This approach requires more birds and stricter selection. You will reject some individuals that excel in one dimension but fail in another. That is the cost of doing it properly. The benefit is that you never lose ground.
Every generation moves toward your goal in all dimensions simultaneously.
You do not spend seven years fixing type only to discover you must spend another ten years recovering colour. Sometimes it is needed to accept a set-back by using a bird solely for colour of another breed by lack of anything else.
Yes, breeding is a hobby, you need patience, the journey is part of the fun, however you don’t want to unnecessarily sacrifice healthy chickens only for their colour (although backyarders are happy with these birds).
In practice, this means accepting a chicken with slightly less perfect type if it carries the essential colour genes. It means tracking desireable colour genes through the generations even when the colour expression is variable. It means understanding that both dimensions are equally part of what defines the breed.
> When the saying might apply
Prioritising only type makes sense if you have access to a breed where colour is already present in related flocks you can use while not ruining your own strain. In that case focusing on type poses less risk, you can reintroduce the correct colour from other good typed birds. But this is an exception, not a rule.
Many breeds do not have closely related populations of both good type and colour. And any outcross introduces its own complications for type... and colour, immune system and the rest, even when it is related to your birds.
For most breeding projects, the old saying is a trap.
It sounds like practical wisdom and leads to practical disasters.
> Build and paint the same time
A breed is not a body plan with colour applied afterward.
A breed is an integrated combination of traits, structural, behavioural, vigourwise and yes, also feather colour, that have been fixed together through selective breeding.
The genes for all these traits coexist in the same genome, travel on the same chromosomes, and must be selected as a packet, all together. The breeders who succeed are those who understand this.
‘First build, then paint’ imagines breeding as a sequential construction: foundation, then framing, then finishing.
Genetics is not construction. It is population management. Every generation, every selection decision, affects everything at once for future generations.
Books on chicken genetics: www.chickencolours.com and 70+ free articles on the website to prevent brainrot.
