HMS Prince of Wales, December 1941

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

HMS Prince of Wales must be a contender for one of the most botched schemes ever applied to models. That said, given the number of conflicting sources that's perhaps not surprising. Some sources even reference paints that would not be available until 3 years after the ship was lost. Others, such as Tamiya's instructions, seem to assume that the Royal Navy's camouflage was a free for all using all sorts of random colours.

 

In any case, HMS Prince of Wales was extensively photographed in mid-late 1941, albeit in black and white. These photographs alone consign many proposed schemes to the bin because the photographs show light tones where the suggested scheme shows dark, and vice versa. We can also dismiss any schemes featuring paints which did not exist at the time - those cannot be well considered if the author suggesting it did not know his paint colour timeline! Study of the black and white photographs allows an accurate map of the camouflage demarcations to be assembled. Furthermore, it is possible to count five separate camouflage colours on each side. Thus, we can eliminate suggested schemes comprising of four colours.

 

That leads to the remaining schemes which are plausible tonally. HMS Prince of Wales was however filmed in colour, just once and very briefly at that, in summer 1941 not too long after the paint was applied, and this gives us an invaluable insight into the hues present.

 

All considered, here's what we have come up with:

 

 

[Dave Swindell]

Excellent detective work there Jamie, and thanks very much for publishing your results.

Any thoughts on what colour(s) the decks might have been?

[salmo G]

Hi Jamie

 

I've followed the thread for this and been very impressed with the work that you all put into it, when Flyhawk eventually release that 1/350 POW these are the colours I will be using! Well done to all concerned.

 

Now if you want to carry out a similar exercise on HMS Queen Elizabeth's first admiralty disruptive scheme (the one thats similar to POW's scheme) i'd be eternally grateful as I have one pencilled in to build next year........  ive already spotted that both colours and the pattern changed over time so looks like i've got some choices to make! but the detective work that you have all put in on POW will ceratinly help.

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

On 10/27/2018 at 6:11 PM, Dave Swindell said:

Excellent detective work there Jamie, and thanks very much for publishing your results.

Any thoughts on what colour(s) the decks might have been?

Thanks Dave, but this has been very much an effort started by others. It was a few years ago now that E.J. Foeth and @dickrd began looking at this seriously, and it was their work on defining 95% of the camouflage demarcations (what we as a group have been calling "the panel map") that I have used as a basis for this illustration. Furthermore, before I was involved the others credited at the bottom of the sheet had established that there were five separate camouflage colours present, not four or six as sometimes is thought, and these had been ordinally notated on the panel map as Tone A, B, C, D and E running from darkest to lightest. It was obvious to most (but not all) that Tone A was MS1 and that Tone C needed to be MS3. It was Tones B, D and E that caused educated debate. The conversation started here:

http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_forum/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=87307

 

... but it was largely padded out with reopening closed arguments and some fairly subjective conjecture that used a lot of time to constrain and close out with proof. E.g. the use of "PB10" kept re-emerging. PB10 was first mentioned in any official documentation in 1944 and was, as far as known documentation goes, exclusively used on submarines.

 

HMS Prince of Wales was a fairly early official camouflage scheme and not successful, being too fussy and the patterns too small and not bold enough to break up the shape of the ship. This meant that to determine the average tone of the ship and therefore figure out what Tones D and E needed to be, a lot of discussion amongst the group was around how Tone D appeared compared to other ships in known schemes. This required finding photographs of the ships together.

 

Once it was agreed that Tone D was a 30% RF paint, that narrowed it down to either B6 or MS4, and the colour cinefilm was instructive there. For Tone B it needed to be MS2, 507A or B5. Here it is hard to say with complete certainty. Sometimes B5 is obvious, but othertimes it seems to wash out in the old colour film particularly at longer ranges. The Tone B on the film does look bluish, so I personally don't feel MS2 is a likely contender. Equally though, whilst I am not a strong advocate of "scale fade" (mostly because modellers almost always screw it up by just pouring in a load of white) but if Tone B was B5 then it needs desaturating anyway on a model because the colour film extract doesn't look as "slap you in the face" blue as B5 often otherwise does, so the modeller should end up with something a lot like Home Fleet Grey anyway - so we settled on 507A for Home Fleet Grey.

 

What has allowed this to be completed as an exercise now has been the combination of having a corrected, agreed colour palette to work with rather than having to mentally adjust the previously available colour palette for the known documented anomalies in it. Furthermore, Sovereign's equipment has allowed digital measurement of the old colour palette so that comparison of tones etc can be objective rather than subjective. Having a documented, authoritative set of Light Reflectance Values on one hand and a set of paint chips without any numbers was quite frustrating for those trying this beforehand. That's without getting into differences in hue...

 

As for the decks, all photographs of the decks I've seen have been B&W, but it seems as though they were unpainted (wooden, of course). There are some camouflage patterns carried onto the tops of the turrets however, and also up the hangar doors. I know what those look like, but it's hard to get all that onto a one-page illustration. I may draw an addendum / second page. If I did that I'd feel I needed to add all the gun barrels and that is a task I dread because it's so tedious 

On 10/27/2018 at 7:47 PM, salmo G said:

Hi Jamie

 

I've followed the thread for this and been very impressed with the work that you all put into it, when Flyhawk eventually release that 1/350 POW these are the colours I will be using! Well done to all concerned.

 

Now if you want to carry out a similar exercise on HMS Queen Elizabeth's first admiralty disruptive scheme (the one thats similar to POW's scheme) i'd be eternally grateful as I have one pencilled in to build next year........  ive already spotted that both colours and the pattern changed over time so looks like i've got some choices to make! but the detective work that you have all put in on POW will ceratinly help.

 

Hi!

 

I would like to tackle Queen Elizabeth, but I feel woefully short on photographs thus far. I need to go on a big exercise gathering data for it. We're all a bit fried now, and will be taking a bit of a break from this for a wee while. Are you going to Telford, out of curiosity?

[salmo G]

Hi Jamie

 

Yes I will be at Telford, will pop by and say a quick hello as I dash about on Saturday, for a start I still need to pick up a couple of pots of paint to complete my new line up of your colours! So far i've unearthed between 20-30 reasonable quality pics spread accross books and the web, it seems obvious that when she was first completed at Rosyth the o/a tone of the pattern was quite dark (bit like your interpretation of POW) then as she went to the mediteranean things started to change, patterns changed slightly and some colour panels were clearly repainted in different colours. My initial thoughts are to go with how she looked at Rosyth as I have a good number of reasonable quality images that cover both sides (but TBH I prefer the more extreme contrast look she had in the MED!) FYI Kostas Katseas has built a very inspiring looking model in just the scheme I plan but suspect the colours are a little suspect, its still excellent inspiration however!

 

Time will tell but I have got a few smaller builds planned in first before i ease myself back into another battle with one of Trumpeters finest............ so far got a list of 50plus issues I need to possibly address, some are backdating work and some just improving detail so no issues with Trumeter there but its obvious just from looking at online pics of the parts (I havent got the kit yet) that I have another 6 months fun?$*8? ahead next year!

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

If you drop me a mail I'd be happy to work on the scheme with you offline?

[salmo G]

will do, give me an hour or so to work out how to first!

[Dave Swindell]

14 hours ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

Thanks Dave, but this has been very much an effort started by others.

Hi Jamie, thanks for your comprehensive reply, and especially the link to the ModelWarships thread. I used to lurk over there, and remember reading the start of that thread, some great photo's, but the camouflage discussion didn't seem to be going anywhere at the time. I've started re-reading it, as it appears you (collectively, and I meant that in my original comment as I'd noted the list of credits, well done to all) have established methods that will give more reliable colour references for other RN ships of the period as well.

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

Due to popular demand, I have added scrap views of the superstructure athwartships views. Every 14" gun barrel is camouflaged in its own right, and there is some camouflage carried onto the turret tops (which may be mostly MS1) - but I'm out of time now and need to do other stuff for Telford.

[Dave Swindell]

Nice one Jamie!, but don't let us stop you getting stuff ready for SMW!