Yes THAT red triplane.

[Nick Millman]

4 minutes ago, Jeff.K said:

if you KNOW you're trying to match chromium dioxide green, sure.  but here's the thing: with WWI kites, this one in particular, we're not that sure of what we're trying to match. 

 

by whom? should this be a candidate for this kite? as i said, point if we knew the pigments (and their source) that were actually used, or at least what would have definitely been available... 

You were suggesting what might have been used and were selectively speculating about pigments.

 

Nick 

[Jeff.K]

2 minutes ago, Nick Millman said:

You were suggesting what might have been used and were selectively speculating about pigments.

 

yeah and what i'm looking for is other pigments/formulas that were used by the Germans at the time. should the formula you quoted be a candidate for this kite? what else is likely to have been used besides synthetic madder lake and / or red oxide? and do you think it would be used with either and/or both of those or by itself? 

Edited October 15, 2017 by Jeff.K

[Nick Millman]

1 minute ago, Jeff.K said:

didn't say i did. i SAID *if* we knew or could at least narrow it down... 

 

what was in RAF Sky besides yellow oxide? anything? if so, then i stand by that. if not, i'd have to see Sky up close. 

 

to clarify when i'm talking about colors made from certain pigments having an identifiable look, i mean BEFORE mixing with other pigments. 

 

Very few paint colours are pure, single pigments, identifiable or otherwise.

 

Nick

[Jeff.K]

Just now, Nick Millman said:

Very few paint colours are pure, single pigments, identifiable or otherwise.

 

artists' paints pretty much always are. you mix the color you want yourself from pigment+binder. gives you more control. 

 

red is a good candidate for single pigment, especially "bright" red. you can't add much to a red to make it "bright" without making it stop being red (and/or desaturating it significantly). 

[Nick Millman]

4 minutes ago, Jeff.K said:

yeah and what i'm looking for is other pigments/formulas that were used by the Germans at the time. 

You'd need to explore the proprietary formulae of German commercial paint manufacturers from 1914-1918. 

 

Nick

[Nick Millman]

2 minutes ago, Jeff.K said:

artists' paints pretty much always are. you mix the color you want yourself from pigment+binder. gives you more control. 

 

red is a good candidate for single pigment, especially "bright" red. you can't add much to a red to make it "bright" without making it stop being red (and/or desaturating it significantly). 

I don't believe that aeroplanes were painted with artists paints. That would have been prohibitively expensive. And you can only make one colour from a single pigment and binder. To vary that you would need to introduce other pigments or mix paint colours.

  

See above for period commercial recipe for "Bright Red" which includes two pigments plus barytes. 

 

Nick

[Jeff.K]

12 minutes ago, Nick Millman said:

You'd need to explore the proprietary formulae of German commercial paint manufacturers from 1914-1918. 

 

i was hoping someone had gotten there first. 

 

4 minutes ago, Nick Millman said:

I don't believe that aeroplanes were painted with artists paints.

not what i was saying, or relevant to it. relevant to the idea that you can make an oxide look like something else. 

 

5 minutes ago, Nick Millman said:

And you can only make one colour from a single pigment and binder.

not entirely true, there are a lot of colors in the yellow to red range that result from an iron oxide pigment + binder. but true enough that if you know the source of the pigment (like PC 10 ochre) you have a predictable range as a starting point. 

i do like what you said about his uniform colors though. as for orange-ish, even a cooler red will break toward orange if you add a dash of white. 

 

9 minutes ago, Nick Millman said:

See above for period commercial recipe for "Bright Red" which includes two pigments plus barytes. 

 

was this particular recipe widely available in Germany? 

[Nick Millman]

Just now, Jeff.K said:

i was hoping someone had gotten there first. 

Not my main focus of research.

Just now, Jeff.K said:

 

not what i was saying, or relevant to it. relevant to the idea that you can make an oxide look like something else. 

But you can, depending what you mix it with!

 

not entirely true, there are a lot of colors in the yellow to red range that result from an iron oxide pigment + binder. but true enough that if you know the source of the pigment (like PC 10 ochre) you have a predictable range as a starting point. 

Well yes, iron oxide pigments vary as already mentioned but if you use only one of them to make paint you will only get one colour. You can mix various iron oxides to produce what can be described as "earth colours" which I think is your point - and that those are always identifiable by eye, which I am less inclined to accept. 

i do like what you said about his uniform colors though. as for orange-ish, even a cooler red will break toward orange if you add a dash of white. 

Unfortunately I can't post pictures here now but if you would like to see them pm me with your email address. The facings colour is similar to the fabric images you posted above. 

 

was this particular recipe widely available in Germany? 

Lead and chromate reds were certainly used in German paints in the 19th Century but I don't know about the source/supply situation 1914-18. Turkey was a major source of chromium.  There are other reds too, as mentioned before, 17 mineral reds, 31 natural reds and 289 Pigment Reds, but pinning each of them down to availability in Germany 1914-18 - or not - would be a major research project. 

Nick

[Jeff.K]

i'd like to replace "always," if i used or implied the word, with "usually," especially in reference to natural pigments.

whether or not iron oxide was present is the most important question to me---it tends to result in a very opaque paint, you'd have to thin it very aggressively to make it transparent. some of the photos i've seen--pieces of the struts, for example--sure look in the photos like they do have some oxide. i think a madder lake over clear (yellowy) dope would give a nicely orange-ish cast, and would also tend to be a lot 'brighter' than an opaque madder--but the 'factory-looking' paint job looks opaque in those old photos. 

11 minutes ago, Nick Millman said:

Unfortunately I can't post pictures here now but if you would like to see them pm me with your email address.

PM'ing as fast as my little hands can fly. you took the photos? if so, what were the lighting conditions as far as you remember? brilliant stuff, thanks. 

[Beardie]

Gentlemen, I think we should put this debate to bed now before the choice of pistols and seconds are chosen as often happens when discussing WWI colours.

 

What I can see clearly is that the two of you are coming at this from different directions Jeff as an artist (I gleaned that you taught and I am guessing, perhaps, you are still a working artist?) and Nick as the scientist and colour composition expert. This is leading to a number of cross-purpose collisions between human visual perception and scientific specifics.

 

Personally I am not a colourman which puts me at a disadvantage as I only know enough about the formulas to select the oils for my next painting or the 'approximate' colour I want for my next WWI model

 

One man might see a bright red while another sees a dull red while the scientist sees a brown in the same colour.

 

I think we should agree to call a halt here and say that, while we don't know what the red was for certain we can now pick the red that we believe it resembled and have done with it.

[Jeff.K]

i think we've worked it out, and a LOT of it has been semantics. in a lot of the threads i saw on theaerodrome.com that ended in pistols at 12 paces, a lot of the bickering could have been avoided if they'd figured out what each other were talking about. people were still grumpy by the end of a particular PC10 

 

Nick, you clearly know your stuff, and a lot of the stuff that made me say whaaaaaaaat was because i wasn't clear what you really meant. hopefully, likewise. 

 

also, again, anything that could be construed as aggressive or insulting, i apologize for that. was NOT my intention. not at all. 

 

PS i definitely think the uniform colors are a great angle. fits with what i know of the times and the man very nicely, and gives another point to compare. hadn't thought about just HOW relevant that should be before... 

[Nick Millman]

Agreed and likewise!

 

Regards

Nick 

[Beardie]

Excellent! This is one of the reasons that I like Britmodeller On other forums I have seen people on the point of making death threats in arguments on WWI colours.

[spaddad]

On 10/14/2017 at 1:58 PM, Beardie said:

 

 

I think accuracy will never be 100 percent with any WWI scheme and, when all is said and done it doesn't really matter that much as long as it is close enough to give us an idea of the colour scheme of individual fliers.

Hi Marty,

thats the most sensible thing anyones said in this whole thread.

[Jeff.K]

1 hour ago, spaddad said:

Excellent! This is one of the reasons that I like Britmodeller On other forums I have seen people on the point of making death threats in arguments on WWI colours.

i've (enthusiastically and gratefully) read a lot of those threads. i admire their passion and, in many cases, knowledge....

 

their common sense and sense of perspective? not so much. 

[spaddad]

Nice model Steve, good job.

[TonyTiger66]

On 13/10/2017 at 9:24 PM, Gordon Branch said:

I only just noticed this topic a have read it with interest.  What surprises me is that with a couple of great pictures of relics within the Australian War Memorial's collection there still seems to be debate over the actual colour.

 

Okay, my turn to chime in.

 

On page 1 of this discussion you'll see a post from a member from Canberra talking about a scrapbook which had belonged to a 3 Squadron AFC pilot named Pickering.  I too am a Canberran member and I will claim that it was my friends and myself who discovered the piece of fabric from MvR's triplane in the book.

 

On the Facebook page referenced here is a photograph we took at the time.

 

 

 

Hello Gordon,

It’s me; that chap from page 1 .

 

I would love to go and have a look at the scrapbook and fragment. Since I made the post, my health has not improved; quite frustrating. I’m still more or less stuck in my bed all the time.

 

As a result, I haven’t been able to go to the AWM to look at the fragment . There’s a lot at the AWM that I like to see; I’m very much prioritising it as my number one place to visit once on my feet.

 

I don’t have a Facebook account at the moment, so unfortunately I can’t see the photograph. 

 

@JackG had suggested taking a photograph with something that is a colour that we can all (model

making people), in our own way, relate to in comparative terms. I liked his idea of the red from an Airfix box. .

 

In the photographs of the components  that @Twobad posted on the first page of the thread, it looks very like a deep oxid(ised) red. to me. Many years ago I attended a night school classic car restoration course. We used many old laquers, paint mixes, some of which are no longer available to be used legally in e.g. the U.K. (where I was at the time).

 

Red oxide based hues from as relatively recent as e.g. 1958 would look a lot like the fragments here in Twobad’s post, at that time after around 40 years of exposure to fresh air. In the case I’m thinking of, a small car that had been stored in a windmill and then forgotten about.

 

I bought and resprayed that one in Nitrocellulose, matching the colour to paint chips I scraped from under interior door trim panels.

 

I digress; I haven’t made many posts this week; too easily led even more off topic than I usually am.

 

I think I’m trying to look

at the level of oxidisation and imagine the original shade, based on the startling difference between exposed and unexposed 40 year old red on that car. Which is probably no good as a comparable  !

 

It was different, very different. When that 1958 car’s paint was new; it would have been the Red Baron’s Triplane red that was just over 40 years old. Mind boggling.

 

I’m glad that you found the fragment in the scrapbook at AWM Gordon, very much looking forward to seeing it  

 

Best regards 

TonyT

[Pauls9cb]

I was recently badgering the IWM on the subject of Triplane relics, unrelated to 425/17, and discovered that somewhere in the IWM archives, there's a fragment of fabric that is supposed to come from 425/17. Here's

the link http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30089399

There's 4 different pics of the same fragment, all showing different shade variations of a much deteriorated section of covering and there's little evidence about the conditions of storage over the last century but my guess nobody worried too much about that back in 1918. Pic no 4 shows a brownish "undercoat" which I guess may be the doped linen finish having changed over time. I'm unsure where this fragment is kept (Lambeth/Duxford/elsewhere) but I understand it's possible to make an appointment to view it. Perhaps this is an input too far since there seems to have been many learned discussions over the colour of a famous Triplane. I think Beardie hit the nail on the head in his last post.

Paul

[Beardie]

Paul thanks for bringing this further relic to our attention, you aren't kidding about 'much deteriorated' that piece could be from anything the condition it is in although, if you look very closely, you can see some red in amongst the dark brown.

[melvyn hiscock]

I remember the late Ray Funnell at the RAF Museum store at Cardington (that was an amazing place to visit) telling me that he thought there was enough 'original' fabric from 425/17 to cover several Gothas! He also told me that someone turned up one day to give him a photo of the Dr1 after the crash and before it was recovered. When the guy turned up it was very definitely not a Dr1 being deficient in wings to the tune of one and also having an excess of crew postiions, however, the owner of the photograph was indignant as he claimed he had taken it and it was original!

[Smithy]

13 hours ago, Pauls9cb said:

I was recently badgering the IWM on the subject of Triplane relics

 

One of the most frustrating things whenever I hear the words IWM and Triplane in the same sentence is the fact that they could very well have the Voss rudder somewhere in their depths. They had it a first time after the war after it was donated by Rhys Davids's mother. It was returned to Rhys Davids's family but Arthur's sister Nesta donated it again in the 1970s. Sadly they don't seem to know what happened to it nor where it is. Arguably one of the most significant surviving artefacts from the first air war but no one remembers where they put it!

Edited October 16, 2017 by Smithy
Spelling

[Jeff.K]

here's where i sit based on all i've read/seen/heard so far... 

 

1) in spite of the lack of documentation, i do think it was spray painted. this opinion is based on reexamining photos of the kite in the Ferko book, after discussion here.

 

2) Nick's photos of Richtofen's uniform are persuasive. assuming the lighting's relatively neutral, i'd shoot to match that color. seems likely that's what the painters were trying to do.  it fits my impression of the times and of Richtofen's character. 'bright' and 'blood' red are very equivocal, subjective terms; the color on the uniform to my eye is more 'bright' than 'blood' but close enough for either. 

 

3) there is considerable variation in the color in the relic photos. this could be due to some being inauthentic, but assuming they are authentic the variation can easily be accounted for if the paint used was translucent. a translucent pigment takes on some of the characteristics of what's underneath, almost like mixing paints. red over CDL is likely to be orangish (which fits a lot of the sample photos) and over a light blue dulled and a bit more purplish (also fits the photos) and very red oxide looking over varnished hardwood

 

4) the 'red oxide' (rust) notes on some artifacts suggest an oxide pigment may have been used, but a) i think these are accounted for partially by translucency, and b ) a possibly somewhat more fugitive pigment, faded somewhat

 

5) i lean toward a madder lake pigment, probably the synthetic German one. Some cadmium reds can come very close to the 'uniform' slightly orangey red, but cadmium pigments are expensive and tend to cover well (opaque). the uniform doesn't have that 'rusty' note visible anywhere, but the photos to my eye have an orangey note and maybe a slight hint of purple-ish

 

for these reasons my (OCD) approach will be

1) paint the kite in CDL/blue undersides/'varnished' wood bits

2) build up thin layers of a good red madder lake, probably try for the best approximation of the kraplak patented in Germany in the 1800s 

3) weather to simulate a) crazing of the dope (visible in close up of cockpit)

 

i'll experiment quite a bit on either sheets of primed styrene plastic sheet before i risk ruining my first attempt at this kite. 

 

if you want the short 'n' dirty version, the color of the trim on the uniform can be approximated by tweaking either a cadmium red or very red (not pink not purple) madder lake paint. i'd be wary of red oxide for 425/17, to my eye the red oxides that i've seen are too 'earthy' 

 

my queue is deep enough that i'm way more than a year away from building this kite, but WNW sending me the Ferko book has infected my brain with the 425/17 virus, so i'll be poking around hoping to learn new things about it, here and elsewhere, that could change my mind (again)

 

---------

PS Smithy: heartbreaking.

Edited October 19, 2017 by Jeff.K
comment on Smithy's post