John Rixon

Thanks for this Nick, some very salient points. I'd be fascinated to read your blog, in the light of other posts of yours I've read, but it appears to be invite only? John

Extraordinary skills! The water, in particular is as good as I've seen. awesome!

I really wish they'd put a few easier to fly 'planes in there. When I first started flight sims (Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator) we had the Zero, which was pure pleasure, and very forgiving. This allowed us to learn how to fly, before jumping into an F4U! I just need to spend hours just flying around in Battle of Stalingrad, before attempting to take on a serious altercation!

Sorry! We ought to take this elsewhere, maybe the mods can move it?

This is so true, and ever will be, how can we possibly know for certain that we all see the same colour? The best we can manage is to describe it in words! Whilst this is true to the extent of how sharp our focus is, I'm not entirely convinced that our ability to discern hue and saturation is - barring colour blindness, which may have not been diagnosed. Having been a practising artist and art lecturer for 38 years, I certainly don't feel that there has been any degradation in this area - how I wish I could say the same about my knees, hearing, and vision focus!

Printed colour charts are also of limited use, being printed onto white paper, using inks and a modern 4 colour printing process. They can only be of any use as a rough guide, IF you are feling the need to make it "right". Online colour charts are all but useless, low res jpegs taken from a printed chart and viewed on a monitor that is most likely uncalibrated, don't get me started on them! The only decent colour charts are the hand painted ones, such as Vallejo's excellent one. However, that Lancaster (in the thread to allude to) wasn't painted in Vallejo model air, therefore colour anomalies will come into play. I'm really not saying I know better, just that it makes Fermat's last theorem look simple, and that, at the end of the day, what is more important is that the model looks right. The only basic premise that I used to give students, when making scale models was "tone it down" - a 1/72 model of a London bus, painted with the same paint that the bus was painted in will look too bright.

Hello folks, I think this may be my first post on this forum, been lurking for quite a while, and in the middle of two 1/48 aircraft builds at the moment, after a prolonged mojo break! I come from an art and design background, lecturing at FE &HE levels on colour theory amongst other subjects (photography, digital image making and moving image). I find it fascinating reading about colour and scale modelling, mostly as there are so many threads, delivered with such authority, about what colour something was painted, and how to replicate this colour. Firstly, even if (more on this later!) we had the exact pigment make-up of a specific colour from 60 odd years ago, it would be only a starting point in determining what to use to paint our model. Colour and surface finish are very much subject to scale, as much as physical detail is. Even if we had a paint that matches exactly, the original paint (and this can only be hypothetical, for countless reasons) it would still not look right at 1/35 per 1/48. The saturation would appear too high and the surface too thick. Surface finishes, such as gloss, satin, eggshell what have you are all affected by this phenomena, so we will always end up making a judgement call on how to modify this in order for it to look "right". This is before we even approach the subject of pigment quality, provenance and different binders and solvents. To be pedantic (!) the only way we could truthfully know what colour that Spifire's nose really was, would be to have acces to a photograph, taken at the time it was in service, with a Kodak grey card in place (to pinpoint exactly the right colour) and then kept in total darkness for the last 60 years - and that would still have to take into account the change in photographic sophistication over the years! No, the best we can manage is an impression, and I don't mean this in any derogatory way at all, fine-art masters have known this for centuries! There are countless beautiful models on this forum, I continue to be staggered at the skills of so many folks on this and other forums, and the colour choices people make, usually informed by research, and underpinned by intuition, are as good as it can ever be, and this is something to celebrate, in my opinion. There are simply too many variable parameters standing in the way of trying to use "science" to select the correct colour - bearing in mind also, that the human brain cannot retain a colour in memory, I suggest that we rely on the judgment and intuition that I alluded to before! I write this as a point of discussion, not as a creed - personally I believe it frees us up from an unachievable goal, and, of course, stimulates more discussion and debate. I hope you'll forgive me for going on a bit!

Looking very good Patrick! I will have a Tiger 1 early waiting for me in a week or two's time! Am building a S/H Marder iii by dragon, at the moment, its my first dragon so I thought it'd be a good intro to their ways - lovely detail, some odd sprue-gate positioning and those instructions!!! Looking at your shading, I'd say you could add some of that after the camo, you are clearly accurate with your A/B! Cant wait to see this continue. Cheers John