Steben

Uhm.... not me 🙃 Those guys with their vehicles at the other side of the Atlantic don't have a spectrometer probably.

Actually the glossy WW1 OD falls somewhat between gloss coated SCC2 and RAL7013. "Sherwin Williams Best Bronze" should be in the right alley.

Yes, frustrating fun! All WW1 OD mixes and the restorations I mention are more khakibrownish than green compared to khaki green 3. Rather in between SCC2 and khaki green 3 and perhaps somewhat lighter. But those are mere words....

After more hours of mixing and dwelling some thought here. On the subject of ww1 US od as described in other threads, the ochre is more specifically raw umber, much darker. On the subject of the service colour it is worth mentioning the weight of the lead even in the second recipes still is an issue when thinking of volume in the mix. It is easy to over-do the white if one mixes this with zinc white and definitely with titanium white. I think lead white pigment weighs about 2,5 times as much as zinc white pigment.

loads of stuff

Ouch, that is a question into the wiiiiiide open ... To grasp the vast landscape in which you plunge I suggest you take a look at https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ It's very "in your face" like and nicely illustrated. Start with ww1 tanks and surf a bit. When it comes to specific questions and paint guides, use this forum!

With the experiments I've done so far I'm slightly moving towards the idea the exact type of dryer or oil is not that crucial to the eventual hue as is the thinning and amount of fluid. If one adds a thick layer of varnish on top of dull dry mix of umber + white, the colour becomes yellowish, excatly like the one on the picture above... The same colour appears when mixing some yellow ochre in dry mix. I think we mentioned this earlier... a semi opaque paint will render a glaze, bringing out the yellow in the umber.... I even added some little flour to the same mix and got a rough surface and a dull warm grey.... I've noticed most cobalt dryers today are dark violet hued. This does add some little character towards olive. Don't know whether it was violet back then. Flower pots with an umber glaze: Another example is the Liberty Truck in Cantigny. These guys did the same thing: scanning an original piece of painted metal. It is very close to Ounan's Dodge, a brown khaki close to field drab. http://www.amps-chicago.org/images/CantignyJune2019 (28).jpg https://nebula.wsimg.com/a9f6175fdb1b01df4716c81db522ca40?AccessKeyId=8097AC226920F6C59E04&disposition=0&alloworigin=1

Marc Ounan's restored ww1 Dodge staff car. The paint is produced base on scans of surviving ww1 painted surfaces The gloss level is not full but almost full gloss which is convincing when looking at the dryer theory. The colour reminds me of field drab. Not that grey at all.

First of all many thanks for adding some thoughts. Some things I've found: Japan dryer is cataloged as an agent with cobalt compounds. It is omnipresent. But not a major artists choice, since it makes for a less glossy effect once hardened in larger mixing amounts. Some describe it as making oil paint "look like acrylics". Might not be that unlogical on military finishes though. I stumbled upon two (!) flake white (lead) paint tubes in an artist supply shop yesterday. Yet they are ... forbidden. They did not have a price tag. White lead has two major characteristics: it is warm orangy (what's in a name) compared to titanium white and has less pigment strength. Titanium white is unforgivingly opaque and a pure usuallly cold white. Again unpopular in the artist world as a mixer. Both characteristics are obtainable with using yellowish oils and less powerful mixing white base paint (incl zinc). All in all not impossible to recreate "some" attempt. I've mixed raw umber oil paint with mixing white already, but I did not add yellowish linseed oil. The results of this was something rather close to Tamiya XF-51. The content, not the greener lid on top . But "Pig slop" is definitely present! The recipe calls for a certain weight in oil paint paste to combine with a certain weight in raw umber pigment. Raw umber has a huge oil absorption index compared to white. About 3 to 4 times as much as titanium white, 4 tot 5 times as much as zinc white and 5 to 6 times as much as lead white. First of all this means one needs far less white if one mixes umber and white oil paints instead of pigments. If you mix 6 times white with 1 time umber paint, you simply get a rather light warm grey. There is simply to little umber in it. Secondly this means one needs less titanium white or zinc white compared to lead white. Titanium usually has a pure to "cold" hue, zinc white can be warm. This means zinc white is a better choice anyway. Raw linseed oil - definitely not refined - is yellowish. But is not "boiled". The very (almost brown) colourful boiled version is mentioned in napoleontic "gros vert" and US 19th century "olive" artillery paint mixes.

Hi guys. I do not need telling what I am doing. I dwell into paints and colours. Many topics have passed and usually the battle between regulation/formulas and in the field/practice schools is defined by how far we go into time and how far standardisation was formed. But. As Americans usually outperform many in standardisation and regulations - whatever the control level was - when it comes to war, they did so quite early. Steve Zaloga picked this up with his reference to the 1916/1917 QM guidelines par. 3964 which refer to the 1906 "Circular 66" which describes an "olive drab" to be used on Army and escort wagons. Officialy, we have a paint/colour used from at least 1906 and during WW1. Some may know this formulation already, but I will repeat: - 6 pounds white lead (mixed raw linseed oil) --------- this a basic white paint paste - 1 pound raw umber - 1 pint turpentine - 1/2 pint japan dryer - 1 quart raw linseed oil This a tinted umber, a bit pushed towards yellowed with the white lead, dryer and oil ingredients. Tinted umber is a greyish brown and only the use of "green" umber would yield a classic light olive drab as we think of in WW2. This unlikely. My first experiments lead to a colour very close to the one here below, but I haven't made the original formula. Anyone knows more on this topic?

Yes, but without specifying a certain age every paint can turn to whatever. OD9 / 319 is known to have had recipes based on both "yellow oxide, chrome yellow and lamp black" as "chrome oxide green, yellow oxide and red oxide". Both will age differently and especially on very old artefacts.

I do not have a BS4800 fan deck yet. This colour keeps popping up whenever I search for matches. It is frequently mentioned when talking about WW1 colours...

Aaaaaaah. Olive Drab. Das Abteilung is as always mostly completely in line with what I was about to say on this one. Olive Drab is as much a specific colour as "green" or "brown" is, which is ... not at all. Once you go specific though, guidelines are to be found. I have different swatches of US ww2 OD, be it 22, 9 or 319. All are very similar apart from gloss level. They will always look very green compared to brown or red and look very brown compared to green. I still have my doubts though about the swap to semi flat in 1944. Afaik this might have happened later in 1945. And we must not forget in practice staff cars usually were glossier than tactical ones. I'm leaning towards one army shade here in theory with several gloss levels once applied. Factory applied, field applied, thinners, .... these affect gloss. Air corps, USAAF, .... is another story. This has a variation from glossy OD 22 to flat dark OD 31 and 41, with an ending here and there in ANA613. About Tamiya. Once again, Abteilung is correct: tamiya is not a great source for "match" paints. It is a brand for the mixers. XF-62 used to be very useful with some XF-60 and came very close to swatches. The later XF-62 are indeed greenish. An excellent mix for scale models when it comes to US ww2 OD is 1 on 1 mix of Vallejo 70.887 + 71.016. Another is Revell 86 (ral7008) + some black to taste according to shade effect. Here you have vallejo mix next to Archer's A-N olive drab.

Yes, if with "medium blue" you mean a certain cyan based blue, perhaps cobalt etc. Ultramarine blue with white will go towards mauve/lilac. In other words: don't go to far away from green element. This is somewhat "tint" of ultramarine. Far too lilac.

Ochre/burnt sienna mix (allowing for a mix of yellow and red oxides) and lamp black compared to OD319 and Humbrol 29. Completely UK battle dress khaki / olive brown (AKA brown with greenish tint) and almost a match with the ochre and raw umber mixes. When I look at it now I think Humbrol 29 + black will indeed get you close. I've seen this trick before. What I remember here is that almost all the known recipes tend to converge to this "battle dress khaki", a (not that dark) brown with a green hint. Slightly more brown compared to D Archer's khaki/PC10 swatch. I do not speak of the late war 80% red oxide mixes. Those will give maroon. I do not speak of mixing tolerance, aging and varnish strength. They happened. But there was a seperate PC12, a RNAS PC10 equivalent and a "green" colour if I believe many comments and excerpts of literature.

That's cool. CDL on the belly and brown above. Thing is, people tend to call any colour according to their taste and cultivation. The "Brown Violet" classic variation of a very brown olive drab easily can yield a "brown" label. Especially in sunny light. The Stampe SV-10 depicted above is a clear example. It is brown but a bit OD as well. I mean, "brown pc10" is definitely not a wild card to paint maroon or almost black. I'ld definitely settle for a "brown but a bit greenish". A kind of "dark" field drab. It is brown, but greenish is mentioned. Everybody wins.

I did on a Camel! I mixed revell 2 x 361 and 1 x 84 (ral6003 and ral8027) and used preshade to get some different tones: Interwar Belgian proto in a great out of the bottle colour by Rudi Vander Linden in Gunze H421: Thing is ... I am busy writing something about olive drab and a chapter on PC10 is included... So it is all about numbers and what was proscribed .

Power of red oxide amounts in the ochre used.....

Yes, PC10 was a cellulose dope coating specification, not merely a colour. But colour cards were used to match with eyeball. And different official recipes did exist as a base that were corrected if needed (diff ochre spec etc) at the spot by adding extra pigments. The RNAS did use something like "Proprietary Khaki" instead of PC10 which was licensed to the RFC. One can expect this to be an equivalent, only bypassing the license. But in the early stage there was a "Ripolin Khaki A" as well... etc etc. And recently I noticed the RNAS had a Dark Green as well in use.... next to Khaki. All elements that make me wonder whether the whole "it was green no brown no everything" discussions are infected with not appreciating the different colours that were in use. There was PC10, PC12, "a" Dark Green and the RNAS had equivalents in use.....

Hi Guys, What I've read so far is that before RFC and RNAS merged into the new RAF on April 1 1918, both used different colours. However, notes and formulas of P.C. 10 existed before and after that date. What does that mean? Did the RFC use P.C. colours while the RNAS did not and the latter was dropped? On the subject of PC10 I can add a little more fuel: A little summary of what I've seen: - The most known pigment formulas are those based on either "yellow ochre + lamp black" or "yellow ochre, raw umber, red ochre and chinese blue". - The ochre and black formulas are often mentioned with a minimum Fe2o3 amount (red oxide), which ranges from around 30% in early ones to 80% in later formulas. - The US adopted British coating at first, calling it olive brown or khaki, but switched to "olive drab" in the 20ties. This olive drab is glossy OD 22, the gloss version of all army OD's later until end of WW2. Funny observation: if one mixes ochre, red oxide and blue one gets a warm dark grey almost black which is easily reduceable to raw umber perhaps with some very low amount of white. This depends on the type of blue and the ratios. If one adds this to the formula, one almost sees only ochre and raw umber. The red and blue are not surprisingly mentioned as extra tools to add if the basic result needed "adjusting". Now, with the right amount of red oxide in the base ochre + black one gets the same colour range. Yellow ochre + raw umber + red ochre + china blue ~ Yellow ochre + raw umber + (some yellow ochre + red ochre + china blue) ~ Yellow ochre + raw umber ~ Yellow ochre + (some yellow ochre + red oxide) + black ~ Yellow ochre (w red oxide) + black ~ This is all based on experiments. All these mixes I tested tend to go very close to battle dress khaki aka uniform colour. Very close to a dark version of field drab (FS30118) and very similar to this: What if ... perhaps .... the rumoured "greenest" of all PC10 is not PC10, but an olive green mixed with almost the same formula but less red oxide? What if ... perhaps .... the "late" PC10 is the same PC10 as in the beginning and the "early" just another colour, perhaps RNAS olive green? What if ... perhaps .... the US dropped the red oxide and got something greener, what we know as typical ww2 olive drab? Was there an RNAS green from the start, next to PC10 (and 12 ...) that got dropped? And was this perhaps closer to US olive drab than PC10?

Well, yes. Yet my point was adding carbon black (given its slightly blue nature) is exactly what might give you the mentioned blueish undertones in the resulting dark green. Gunze H58 was a great (zinc chrom) interior green, but they choose to ruin it ending up with something like tamiya XF4. left old, right new (not my picture though). I guess adding some black again might render the original.

Might be! Judged only by other comments on this one. As I've read now, those primer and aricraft colours are complex. At least I can conclude interior green is zinc chromate with black. The variation can easily come from amounts of black used. Yet ... adding carbon or lamp black to a lemon yellow brings out more blueish green undertones.

I am no B17 specialist. But I do know interior green (primer) used on many other aircraft can be mixed with bright lemon yellow and black. Zinc chromate green is nothing more than zinc chromate yellow with black added. And dull dark green is even more black.

That green story is still an enigma.