I would like to breed my broken lilac English lop. I don't have another English lop buck to breed her with and can't find any nearby. What other breed could I breed her with to still have the English lop gene dominant but also get tri coloring? I'm still learning rabbits. So coloring and breeding process is very new to me
Thinking of tricolor as a broken harlequin can be helpful. So you are halfway to a tri with your broken lilac.
The allele for harlequin <ej> is in practice only partially recessive; one copy actually can produce limited harlequin markings in some cases. In fact if your doe
happens to carry non-extension <e> (which could come from red, orange, tort or ermine in her ancestry, and can lurk in the background for a long time even if it doesn't show up on her pedigree), you will have a good chance of getting harlequins and/or tris in the first generation if you can find a harlequin or harlequin carrier buck.
The lop ear gene is also considered recessive, but in practice it too behaves as partially recessive: i.e. lop crosses can have lopped ears, partially lopped "airplane ears," one ear lopped and the other upright, or both upright. But in any case English Lop ears are so extreme that any cross will result in something pretty far from the long ears you want in an English. English Lops also have a fairly unusual body type (called semi-arch or mandolin, also found in Flemish Giants, Americans, Beverens and Giant Chinchillas) that you will lose if you breed your doe to a non-English Lop, especially since the other breeds are massive (French), stocky and compact (Mini) or miniature but heavy boned high head mount (Holland) types.
Here is an example of proper type for an English Lop:
Here are other semi-arch aka mandolin body types (from the ARBA
Recognized Breeds)
American
Flemish Giant
Giant Chinchilla
And here are the body types of other lop breeds (also from the ARBA
Recognized Breeds):
Holland Lop (maximum weight 4 lbs)
Mini Lop, max weight 6.5 lbs
French Lop, huge with no maximum weight (photo from
French Lops)
You might consider letting the color go for the moment and just find a way to breed her to another EngLop, as it will probably take quite a long time to get back to the unique features that make them EngLops.
That said, I agree with
@eco2pia that if you are intent on making tris, finding a lop of another breed in harlequin is probably your best bet, especially since you are more likely to find one of those (especially the smaller two breeds) in harlequin than any of the other breeds with a mandolin type. Although not nearly as common as Hollands, a French Lop would be my first choice since like the Eng Lop it is big and does not have a maximum weight; look for one that is poorly-typed, i.e. long and low in the shoulder, rather than properly typed for Frenchie. Just be mentally prepared to spend several generations getting back to an EngLop head, ear and body type (the long shoulder will probably appear pretty quickly, but the ears may not).
