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Painting an SE5a


cymaz
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The colours of SE5as and many other British WW1 aircraft are a can of worms! According to the Albatros Windsock Datafile on the SE5a the main colour, PC10, is anything "between Methuen 3 (E/F)8 and almost 5F8." In my view this will vary from factory to factory, to how steady the painter's hand was when he mixed the paint to how much sunlight an individual aircraft was exposed to! 

 

Some people see PC10 as a green others as a brown. The late Derek Hardman, the proprietor of Solarfilm, was insistent that the recipe for PC10 could not produce a brown hence his Dark Green Solartex was said to emulate PC10. On the other hand Dan San Abbott, an authority on Great War aircraft suggested that the recipe reproduced below produced a Chocolate Brown!

 

"In the receipe for PC-10 to make 100 gallons of dope the 74 lbs of pigments were:
640 oz. yellow ochre
480 oz. umber
40 oz. red ochre
24 oz. chinese blue.
Umber is a very dark brown pigment these pigments mixed together and with carbon black would result in a dark brown color much like the color of chocolate."

 

I also read an autobiography of a pilot who said that the colour of his aircraft exactly matched "that incredible morass of The Salient." Brown? Or had all of that chemical warfare stained the mud green?

 

I used to be a decorator so have quite a good sense of colour but to me some of the aircraft of the Shuttleworth Collection for example look green while others look brown to me. You're on your own Cymaz! ?At least you won't be entering it in the Nats!

 

What I want to know is, "Did they paint the wings first then paint the roundels on top of them or did they paint the roundels on top of the unbleached linen and then paint the PC10 around them?

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I once got a look at the "Methuen Book (Handbook?) of Colour" at the local reference library but I don't think that they have reference libraries anymore, and I once painted a Sopwith One-and-a-Half-Strutter in a Triumph car brown colour. I can't remember the name of the colour but it looked close enough to me!

Edited by David Davis
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I'm not convinced that the colour of a model should match that of the original.  Look at a landscape photograph; The intensity of the colours diminish as they get further away. Apply this to our wee toys,  if we look at say a full size WW2 fighter, we need to be quite some distance away for it to fill our field of vision. so the colours are slightly muted. BUT, when we look at a model we are invariably much closer, so the colour of the original needs a drop of say grey added, so that it avoids the dinky toy look

ernie

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When I painted my Gordon Whitehead FF Sopwith Triplane back in the 70s, the info I was able to get at the time on WW1 British colours ranged from "they were green" to "they were brown".  So I got 10 tinlets of Humbrol Dark Earth and 10 of Dark Green (i.e. early 1940s day camouflage scheme) and mixed them together.  The result looked a bit light, so I stirred in a tinlet of black and painted the result on.  It looked just right to me and in fact looked a touch brown in strong sunlight and distinctly green in poor light!

 

When I came to paint my 1/4 scale Pup many years later, I used Flair Spectrum PC10 which looked pretty much like the mix I'd previously come up with.  Spectrum paints are defunct, but the Flair colours are now produced by Guild as the Chroma range - and they do a PC 10...

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Cymaz

I think you will find there was an official colour determined in the contract but how well the manufacturers adhered to it is open to question. 

Its all to long ago to be sure even if a scrap of original linen still exist as it would have changed colour by now.

In squadron service I doubt anyone really cared if one plane was a slightly different shade or that any repairs matched exactly.

 

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10 minutes ago, Simon Chaddock said:

Cymaz

I think you will find there was an official colour determined in the contract but how well the manufacturers adhered to it is open to question. 

Its all to long ago to be sure even if a scrap of original linen still exist as it would have changed colour by now.

In squadron service I doubt anyone really cared if one plane was a slightly different shade or that any repairs matched exactly.

 

 

True Simon..

I’ve also seen beautifully crisp D-Day Invasion stripes!

 

2BA0F3A1-FC4A-4FA4-B832-6B7A8E0AF34E.jpeg

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I would be happy with that Maurice, one of the modelling mags, some years ago published photos of an aircraft at  the Shuttleworth collection at various times of the day  and different shutter speeds 8 pictures from about the same angle were quite different shades the colours were blue and cream. In the 1970's Ford Escorts were made in a few different factories in the EU and one particular colour a metallic blue had many shades depending on where the car was made and the suppliers of the paint. It was a nightmare for body resprays trying to get the right match . Paint matching has always been a can of worms I tend to use Humbrol as a guide and no one has said my models are the wrong shade. 

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Eric, it's all down to perspective. Different weather/backgrounds reflect different hues and shades. According to books I've read on the RFC/RAF, paint and dope was mixed and applied in the field could be "anything they had lots of'. And who can say any model of an in service Aeroplane is 'the wrong colour- ??.

 

That photo of mine is my Flair SE5a, painted with Valspar, matched to Humbrol PC10. Which by the way, is identical to Guild Chroma PC10. Which is Flair Spectrum.

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  • 2 months later...

Sorry to jump on an old thread but thought I would add my 2 pence worth. which kind of sums up what has been said before... 

 

My background I have in the past worked at a paint manufacture and I spent the last 10 years building plastic models. 

 

until recently paint plants added pigments by hand.  I have seen most plant staff guessing the amount added i.e. 100g is half a bag so I  will add half a bag by eye.  

So as you can imagine one batch did not match another batch. 

Now this is in peacetime with no shortages .  so imagine what happed during a war or in the field. 

 

One of the hotly debated topics in the Plastic hobby is what is the right colour for x y and z.  Here is a good example of how much variation there are between what model paint mfg think STD colours are:  https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/70597-rlm-luftwaffe-comparison-chart/.  

 

Also take a look at the discussion on what colour the P51 Mustang LOU IV was painted and we have colour photos of that plane. 

 

Then we need to think about are you painting a factory fresh machine or one that has been in the sun and rain.  Has it been wiped down and fuel cleaned off it.  Has it been patched and or repaired.  Was it repainted in the field or sent back to the factory ? 

 

 

We have no photos of what colour any plane in WW1 really were. Some might have been green some brown we have no idea.   I have not seen much research or documentation on what happens to PC10 over time or its reaction to conditions in the field.   

WW2 colour photos are also not a very realistic colour match as the colour has faded or not been reproduced accurately. 

 

 So in summary

  • We have no colour photo evidence   
  • We know the technical spec of what the paint but we suspect it is not reliable
  • We have no way of knowing the effect that weather / combat / use would have had on the machine we are trying to re-produce.

 

So what can we do; well research will give us a good idea of the options we might have.  Then just do what you think looks good / right.  who will be able to argue with you based on the evidence / lack of it discussed above. 

 

I have a friend who creates a story for each "mistake he makes on a model" -for example if the  colour is a bit off on a wing,  he has a story of where they patched it after damage. 

 

At the end of the day we are reproducing these models for our enjoyment, some of the fun is the research into what it might have been but at the end of the day no one really knows, so go with what you like. 

 

 

 

 

 

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On 05/11/2021 at 16:46, cymaz said:

Doing some reading up on the subject of paint colours in WW1, it was a bit of a lottery as to what shade you ended up with. 

 

 

DB359441-F259-47DB-A4E1-9BB7FFF63CAD.jpeg

 

Jonathan......Are these any good then? The red and blue have a bit of a sheen where as the white is Matt.

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Just to shove a modern reality check into the scheme, I type this on an I pad. It’s colours are not accurate. They can be rebalanced, to something better to the beholders eye. Do it on a right fancy camera, same result. 
In the days of film, they had another layer of uncertainty. 
As Jonathon says, eye, judgement.

Good news is, do what you think looks nice. 
 

And,  I read in the past, if you wish to rely on a museum model, the writer related seeing the restorer repainting the exhibit with Airfix paint. So a proper scale modeler can use it as a source that the model has a real origin, but not as a source of reality.

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Even without trying to reproduce a colour picture, lighting can make a huge difference in brown/green. I happen to like olive green trousers. Several times I have had to take them back as there is a version of the colour that is clearly nicely green indoors and is clearly an uninteresting mud in daylight.

 

My scale (very sport-scale) is definitely wrong: it is in the current markings seen on the Shuttleworth example. We can go and see that, and it is currently brown. Mine is green because I prefer them looking green.

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I will do a couple of test patches. I’m unable to replicate the base colours in my garage, they’re automotive 2k paint. I’m just going to see how “shiny “ the red and blue show up. If it’s not too garish, I proceed. 

 

I will I’ll take a few pictures to show the results....based on previous views of the perception of colour, it should put the cat amongst the pigeons.

?

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I have the Windsock data books for both the SE5a and Sopwith Pup and they have full colour pictures of the different schemes as well as some original monochrome prints.  Apparently there's a method of scanning the grey scale and coming up with the original colour (and some WW1 types are very colourful).  However, it's far from accurate and is, at best, an intelligent guess.  In any case, who's to say all the (say) reds were exactly the same shade from batch to batch - even modern wallpaper varies - if you need to buy an extra roll it's likely to look different from the ones you bought at the start.

 

So there's no real answer.  The shade of PC10 you choose is as likely to be as authentic as the next person's.  For what it's worth, I used Flair Spectrum PC10 on the Flair SE5a I built over 20 years ago.  It looks all right to me if you ignore its general tattiness!

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