"Red 19" - Early Spitfire Mk. I, No. 19 Squadron, RAF +++ FINISHED +++ (more or less)

[TonyOD]

The Maskol is off and it's not looking bad, although I worry I may have gone with perhaps a slightly too bright shade of green. It's not as "blue" as it appears in this photo and I guess will look ok with a wash and a matt finish.

 

 

Sure enough there's a bit of this going on. I think though if I let it dry absolutely thoroughly I should be able to knock the edges back to where they should be with a rub from some Micromesh.

 

 

[flashlight]

Looking good, Tony! I hope that the edges of the green colour will turn out okay!

[AdrianMF]

Looks good. Revell green is my current goto colour for RAF, but I'm now trying out the AK Air acrylic one as it's a bit "browner".

 

I generally brush my top camo coats guided by faint pencil markings just inside the area to be covered. For me, it's easier painting paint than mastic!

 

Regards,

Adrian

 

 

[Troy Smith]

11 hours ago, AdrianMF said:

Looks good. Revell green is my current goto colour for RAF, but I'm now trying out the AK Air acrylic one as it's a 

 

This maybe worth a read

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235117058-revell-aqua-acrylics

 

As readings show that the Revell Aqua RAF Dark Green, Dark Earth and Sky are close to the RAF museum paint chips, 

 

I'm rather dubious about any of the Spanish paint companies ability to match colours "with both hands and a map" shall we say... 

 

HTH

 

[bigbadbadge]

Shame about those edges Tony hopefully be able to sort those out okay though.  Looks good overall. 

 

Chris

[TonyOD]

Today's modelling activity has been limited to keeping an eye on the bunfight, and making a start on some creative masking before I rattlecan the underside. There's the slightest hint of a join along the top of the nose which is bugging me, so I'm giving that some attention. A rub down with some very fine Micromesh has sorted out those rough edges on the camo. I used to use pencil lines myself @AdrianMF but invariably found myself looking at them in the finished model!

 

 

On the subject of colour choices @Troy Smith I try not to get too carried away about exact matching to a given plane that flew 80 years ago and was only ever photographed in black and white(!) I brush paint with enamels, I prefer Humbrol simply because there's a branch of Boyes round the corner that stocks them. Below are my (for better or worse) "go to" paints for the four main British WW2 camo schemes, all Humbrol apart from the dark green where I prefer Revell 68, though I've found myself fretting that it's too green (Airfix recommend Humbrol 30 for dark green, which I find odd - it appears very "blue"). I lifted these colours from this page. I realise of course that there would have been variations between renderings of the same shade (fading, different manufacturers/batches etc.) but I'm really looking for consistency on the shelf, if that makes any sense!

 

 

Thanks for looking in!

[Troy Smith]

11 minutes ago, TonyOD said:

I brush paint with enamels,

Use Colourcoats.  The only paint company who post here and do proper research...  there maybe others who do,  but plenty seem very poor in that front, especially the acrylics.

 

As for the rest....you did ask...

 

11 minutes ago, TonyOD said:

I prefer Humbrol simply because there's a branch of Boyes round the corner that stocks them. Below are my (for better or worse) "go to" paints for the four main British WW2 camo schemes, all Humbrol apart from the dark green where I prefer Revell 68,

Humbrol 116, or the satin 163 are rated for Dark Green.   Recent thread on Revell Aqua with spectrometer readings rated the acrylic H68 as being a pretty good match.

see

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235117058-revell-aqua-acrylics

I don't know about the enamel matching the acrylics though,  but you might want to check out the other Revell RAF, 59 Sky and 82 Dark Earth.

 

Thing is,  Humbrol don't really do colour matches, the exception was some specific Luftwaffe colours, in the 200 range.   So,  what they specify are the closest.  H29 and H90 are OK, and maybe better in enamel.   I'm not very impressed in acrylic.

 

 

25 minutes ago, TonyOD said:

I try not to get too carried away about exact matching to a given plane that flew 80 years ago and was only ever photographed in black and white

This is not some lost series of tablets of ancient knowledge,  Though given the right balls-up the acrylic 'matches' are you'd think it was.

 

 The depressing thing is plenty of documentary evidence to say pretty much how a plane was painted 80 years ago, and what those colours were. 

 

 

This is by @Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies, who runs Colourcoats and has done primary research on RN colours, making up samples from original paint formulas for example, and taking on board information from respected researchers.

 

I keep quoting this.   I do because it is the most useful bit of real world information on real paint I have read on here, and the more people who read and understand the better, and it contradicts some of the right cobblers I have seen posted on here.    

 

"I'm going to point out some facts about real-life paint manufacture and either the reader will understand and "get it" or will not understand and are in no position to contradict me.

 

1) Usually camouflage colours are fairly low saturation colours because these blend in better with nature. They're seldom bright and bold. Low saturation colours are normally manufactured by adding coloured pigments to a base made from inexpensive white or white and black pigments.

 

2) Colour pigments are expensive. The expense varies depending on the specific pigment, but they're expensive.

 

3) The only way to over-saturate a colour so much is to substantially over-dose your base with the expensive colour pigments. I'm not talking about a few percent more or less - that causes minor differences which you only confirm the presence of with one swatch adjacent to another - I'm talking more in the order of a double dose to get something you obviously look at and think "woah".

 

4) In the case of colours like dark olive, these are mostly white, black and ochre (which is relatively inexpensive for a colour pigment) sometimes further tinted with a bit of red or green (which are often very expensive).

 

5) There can certainly be variances in a manufactured paint, but these tend to be greatly overstated, i.e. used as a ready made excuse for all sorts of mistakes. Ultimately, the only way a manufactured paint can end up so oversaturated is to have dumped in a vast amount of the expensive pigments, if not adding in new additional pigments in large quantities not expected in the recipe. Frankly, it's difficult to see how any manufactured paint could end up so drastically off target, particularly in the over-saturated sense, by any business that wasn't actively trying to bankrupt itself by roasting through obscene quantities of pigments like chrome green which were already expensive at the start of the war and in particularly short supply during.

 

6) I'd venture that most of the "there was a war on, you know" type apologists for such spectacular errors probably don't have any actual experience of what is and isn't possible when mixing different proportions of 2,3 or 4 pigments when 2 of those are usually black and white just to make your base to tint. You simply cannot end up with a Humbrol 30-esque bluish green using only the ingredients to make olive - i.e. you'd actually have to sabotage it by introducing if not blue then an obviously bluish green. Same goes for that bright green Spitfire above - you can't achieve that with black, white, ochre and a touch of red - you'd need to fire in a lot of bright green pigment in to get that saturated on an overly-light base. It would be more tan-like just using the basic olive green ingredients which only turns obviously olive when tinted enough with black. Put another way, with a fixed number of pigments in various ratios you WILL end up somewhere within a certain envelope, and usually when colours like this bright green are discussed it's because it's well outside that envelope.

 

The point of all the above? In essence it's harder to make a credible explanation for how such a colour might have been arrived at in a real-life paint manufacturing environment than it is to demonstrate that someone would have had to go to a lot of trouble to get it so far wrong. That is harder to rationalise than just getting it closer to correct."

 

from

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235078859-accuracy-of-ammo-by-mig-jiménez-raf-wwii-colours/page/3/#elControls_4045174_menu

Note a few posts on a Youtube vid showing paint mixing from pigments.

 

Context, in ww2 the British army was using 8,000 tons of paint a year, and the Aircraft industry used far more paint than that. I think the UK made about 100,000 aircraft during the war,  how much paint does one Lancaster use?  They built over 7,000 etc etc 

 

The demand for green pigments was such that the RAF was given priority and the army and navy had to use other pigments, the reason why British tank swapped from Khaki Green G.3 to SCC2 Brown in 1942, the  base pigment was Burtisland Red, a waste material from the aluminium production process.

 

We are talking about vast amounts of pigment needed, let alone the other ingredients.    One reason was the USAAF dropped painting all together. 

 

And the colours had been carefully designed for the various jobs they needs to do.    

This Life magazine image, from May 1941,  on my screen gives a very good representation of the colours, and their how they look in juxtapostion.

Spitfire in England by Etienne du Plessis, on Flickr

 

Note the faces, grass, sky, roundel colours (dark blue, brick red, subtle orange hued yellow, which are what they should look like) 

 

Dark Green is dark olive green

Dark Earth is brown with a subtle green hue,   not reddy, not beigey, or chocolaty.    

Sky is a very pale yellow green  - many model paints make it a bit 'muddy' 

Medium Sea Grey is a grey with a very subtle purple-blue hue

 

Yes, paints did fade and weather,  but many WW2 planes had very short service lives.  

 

11 minutes ago, TonyOD said:

though I've found myself fretting that it's too green

 

11 minutes ago, TonyOD said:

(Airfix recommend Humbrol 30 for dark green, which I find odd - it appears very "blue").

Right, why Airfix recommend H30 is beyond me.     well, maybe it's not.  Back when Airfix made their own paints, (late 60's to early 80's) they specified M3 Dark Green. 

The Humbrol "equivalent" was H30.   It was a blue green in 1975,  I still have kits done in H30 when M3 was unavailable and even age 9 I was fuming as they were not the same colour.   I did think Airfix were the font of all knowledge then, but, I was 9.... 

It seems from the researches of @John  that at some point H30 WAS an olive green.

 

See

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234989589-humbrol-30-is-there-a-use-for-it/page/2/#elControls_2313899_menu

 

Anyway, in time Airfix became part of Humbrol, and they have been knocking out the H30 crap for so long that many modellers think it should be a blue green.... 

 

Back to your paint picks, without switching to Colourcoats, (and the only reason I don't is I'm not a fan of enamel solvents or clean up...)  or getting a copy of the RAF museum chips and swatching and  mixing paint...  and you would not believe how much work I went into trying to match Dark Earth with the Tamiya paint I had....   

 

then what you are using are as good as you'll get using Humbrol enamels..... Might be worth investigating the other Revell colours....

 

I mean... you did ask....  

[TonyOD]

@Troy Smith - Good Lord, man, don't you sleep?!?!

 

Thanks as ever for the exhaustive information. I'm sure you've forgotten more about this stuff than I'll ever know! That picture of the Spitfire is a beauty.

 

I'm aware of Colourcoats and their well-deserved reputation, of course, but those twin enemies of accuracy, convenience and economy, have their say in my choice of paints and for my modest aspirations I feel happy with the fit of what I've got.

 

Actually Revell 68 and Humbrol 116 are very similar - pic below is from my experiments, Revell above the dark earth, Humbrol below. The Revell I feel is very slightly greener.

 

 

7 hours ago, Troy Smith said:

many WW2 planes had very short service lives

 

K9797 was one such plane! A handy justification for paucity of weathering when the time comes...

[TonyOD]

Steady progress… most of the Spit has a coat of Klear that I’ll allow to cure thoroughly before getting busy with the decals. Bit of fresh dark earth on the nose where I’ve sorted out that join.

 

 

The underside is now pleasingly doped up.

One bonus of dealing with those flakey edges on the camo is that I’ve found that rubbing the whole model down with some 4000 micromesh makes all the dried paint smoother to the touch, which can’t be a bad thing.

 

I’m enjoying this one!

[bigbadbadge]

Looking good Tony, glad you were able to sort out the edges of the camouflage demarcation lines too.  I used to use Humbrol 116  and have had to go back to it for the Mk.XIV I have just restored,  but I changed sometime  ago to Humbrol 163 , Humbrol are my go to paints as I brush paint too although, I also use Colourcoats too and like using them too, I always add some thinners and recommend their Naptha thinners.

Great work on this. 

Chris

[Biggles87]

The green looks better to me now after the Kleer coat.

The nose joint often causes problems on Spitfire kits. I tend to buy single piece resin replacements when possible. There are quite a few available, it just depends on how much you want to spend on aftermarket bits.

Nearly there.

 

John. 🇺🇦

[flashlight]

Looking very nice already, Tony! Good job so far, looking forward to see her with decals!

[TonyOD]

3 hours ago, bigbadbadge said:

I always add some thinners and recommend their Naptha thinners.

I just use white spirit out of a massive bottle 😁. I probably let myself down with my painting…

 

2 hours ago, Biggles87 said:

The nose joint often causes problems on Spitfire kits.

I don’t really have an excuse here, the nose is just the front end of the two fuselage halves, not separate parts. Somehow I ended up with a slight step. Anyways, sorted now.

 

2 hours ago, Biggles87 said:

it just depends on how much you want to spend on aftermarket bits

To borrow from the Bard: “Ay, there’s the rub!” 😁

 

Thanks for the encouraging words all.

[jackroadkill]

7 minutes ago, TonyOD said:

I just use white spirit out of a massive bottle 😁. I probably let myself down with my painting…

 

At the risk of coming across like The Bloke Off The Internet, I've found white spirit to be great for cleaning brushes but not ideal for thinning.  Colourcoats thinner, in addition to smelling a whole lot better, seems to impact on the finish of the paint much less and also dries faster.  It's worth trying some even if you use Humbrol and Revell paints.

[TonyOD]

I might just do that, @jackroadkill.

[mark.au]

This Spitfire is shaping up rather nicely indeed.  It’s nice to see a prewar scheme for a change.

[TonyOD]

Couldn’t sleep so an early shift on the stickers. I do like those quirky overwing roundels.

 

Supposedly you can peel off the carrier film from these decals but I’ve seen mixed reviews of this so don’t want to chance it.

 

Edited November 6, 2022 by TonyOD

[flashlight]

Very nice, now she comes to life! Looking very good already!

[bigbadbadge]

Love these early roundels, looking good Tony.

Chris

[jackroadkill]

3 hours ago, TonyOD said:

 

Supposedly you can peel off the carrier film from these decals but I’ve seen mixed reviews of this

 

Same here; I'm yet to try an Eduard kit with the newer decals and am thinking that testing them on a mule will be the way forward.  Now I just need a mule...

[Biggles87]

I like the early oversize roundels also although the yellow looks a little opaque from where I'm sitting.

 

John. 🇺🇦 

[Troy Smith]

23 hours ago, TonyOD said:

I just use white spirit out of a massive bottle 😁. I probably let myself down with my painting…

 

On 05/11/2022 at 09:31, bigbadbadge said:

I always add some thinners and recommend their Naptha thinners.

 

23 hours ago, jackroadkill said:

At the risk of coming across like The Bloke Off The Internet, I've found white spirit to be great for cleaning brushes but not ideal for thinning.  Colourcoats thinner, in addition to smelling a whole lot better, seems to impact on the finish of the paint much less and also dries faster. 

Unless yu0onuse high grade white spirit, it's really fairly oily gunk...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naphtha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spirit

Note both are all forms of petroleum distillate.   Which are all saturated hydrocarbon.. now, if this is causing bad memories of chemistry classes,  I'll explain a bit,   the basic saturated hydrocarbon in methane, natural gas, CH4, 1  carbon atom, 4 hydrogen.    It's the amount of carbon atoms that are of concern.

cigarette lighter with gas under pressure so it's liquid, but when released become a gas  are filled with butane.  That is 4 carbon.  Camping gas is propane, which is 3 carbon.

Zippo type lighter fuel is light naptha, and is 5-6 carbon. (pentane - 5, Hexane 6)     (as the molecule get bigger they can be straight chain, branched chains and rings) 

Petrol/gasoline, is 7-9 carbon ,  everyone know octane*,  which  is 8 carbon.

White spirit in the link is mix of 7-12 carbon, and can have traces of other chemicals, eg sulphur.

Kerosene/paraffin is on the higher weight range, -12-15

Diesel is 25-30 carbon

tar 45-50 carbon.

 

But they are all made of the same basic stuff...    I recall many years ago as south down ranger using petrol for the chainsaws to thin paint for a Shepard's caravan I I got the job of painting .... 

 

the short is this, as seen in the link 'light naptha' is zippo lighter fuel.  It will thin enamel paint no problem. It is very very volatile.   I bang on about using it to thin artist oils for washes all the time on her.

  As will petrol.   

White spirit is heaver, and as the link says

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_spirit#Solvent_and_paint_thinner

"White Spirit is a petroleum distillate used as a paint thinner and mild solvent.

White spirit is an inexpensive petroleum-based replacement for the vegetable-based turpentine. It is commonly used as a paint thinner for oil-based paint and cleaning brushes, and as an organic solvent in other applications. Mineral turpentine is chemically very different from turpentine, which mainly consists of pinene, and it has inferior solvent properties.[8][failed verification] Artists use white spirit as an alternative to turpentine since it is less flammable and less toxic. Because of interactions with pigments in oil paints, artists require a higher grade of white spirit than many industrial users, including the complete absence of residual sulfur.

White spirit was formerly an active ingredient in the laundry soap Fels Naptha, used to dissolve oils and grease in laundry stains, and as a popular remedy for eliminating the irritant oil urushiol in poison ivy. It was removed as a potential health risk.

White spirit has a characteristic unpleasant kerosene-like odor. Chemical manufacturers have developed a low odor version of mineral turpentine which contains less of the highly volatile shorter hydrocarbons.[9] Odorless mineral spirits is white spirit that has been further refined to remove the more toxic aromatic compounds, and is recommended for applications such as oil painting, where humans have close contact with the solvent."

 

The low odour are likely to be worse for model paint then.    The model thinners, like Colourcoats will be clean naptha,  likely a bit heavier than light fuel,  which is very volatile.

In short, for model use, use good proper thinners.  You could of course mix lighter fuel and white spirit, in varying amounts,  but since you are not using much,   then it's not a ridiculous expense...

 

A quick look for industrial paint thinners eg 

https://www.brewers.co.uk/product/BN4816N  which is about £20 for a litre

product data sheet

https://www.brewers.co.uk/uploads/datasheets/hands/202777.pdf?v=1633510665

 

hydrocarbons, C9-C11, n-/ iso-/ cyclo-alkanes, < 2% aromatics ≥25 - ≤50

xylene ≥25 - ≤50

hydrocarbons, aromatic, C9  ≥10 - <20

ethylbenzene  ≤10

 

.... use in a well ventilated area....  

 

*octane,  you will note references of 87 Octane and 100 Octane petrol on model stencils.  This is the Octane scale,   Plain Octane,  as in a straight chain  8 carbon molecule score minus 20 on the octane scale

100 octane is 2,2,4 Tri Methyl Pentane.  Which is also 8 carbon.       

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,2,4-Trimethylpentane

What's the difference?   How it's arranged in space,  it is  a 5 carbon chain (pentane) with methyl groups (1 carbon x3)  on the 2nd and 4th carbon in the chain, and the difference is when it combust in an engine it stops knocking... from the link

 

"Engine knocking is an unwanted process that can occur during high compression ratios in internal combustion engines. In 1926 Graham Edgar added different amounts of n-heptane and 2,2,4-trimethylpentane to gasoline, and discovered that the knocking stopped when 2,2,4-trimethylpentane was added. This work was the origin of the octane rating scale.[7] Test motors using 2,2,4-trimethylpentane gave a certain performance that was standardized as 100 octane. The same test motors, run in the same fashion, using heptane, gave a performance which was standardized as 0 octane. All other compounds and blends of compounds then were graded against these two standards and assigned octane numbers."

 

Knocking is the uneven combustion of the fuel, a long chain goes in like string of bangers, and branched chain goes more like a starburst AFAIK.   

 

And is one of the reasons for adding lead, as it's not plain lead,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetramethyllead

Tetramethyllead, also called tetra methyllead and lead tetramethyl, is a chemical compound used as an antiknock additive for gasoline.[1]

 

if you have been following this,  you will note the tetra(4) Methyl groups... which combust evenly, and are an easy to way increase a fuels octane rating....

 

Right, I'm going to stop here,  but for modelling purposes you can see the difference between high power use (black exhaust stains) and  'leaned out' low power use,  that typical light grey brown often seen on Lancaster upper wings....    I can add some pics if needed?

 

A bit of a ramble  but hope of interest.....

 

 

[TonyOD]

3 hours ago, Biggles87 said:

I like the early oversize roundels also although the yellow looks a little opaque from where I'm sitting.

 

John. 🇺🇦 

 

When you say “opaque” do you mean “transparent”? 😁 There is indeed a hint of what lies beneath showing through the yellow.

 

Generally the decals sit down pretty well. My worry with this peeling off the carrier film thing is that where the decal hasn’t adhered completely to the paint (around a raised rivet, say) it would peel off with the film. In any case the film is no more prominent or intrusive than any other I’ve seen.

 

 

[TonyOD]

Informative and exhaustive as ever, @Troy Smith, thank you. If you remember I nabbed your lighter fuel-based enamel wash technique a while back, so I already have a bottle of the stuff. I’ll give it a spin on my next build. 

[Troy Smith]

1 hour ago, TonyOD said:

the decal hasn’t adhered completely to the paint (around a raised rivet, say)

Try a cloth damp with hot water to  get them to bed down, or use warm to hot water for the decal water.  I have used a coffee machine hot plate to keep water hot before.  This can really help with decal pliability.  

    I'm sure the decals look fine on the model, but with the camera macro they don't look great for  colour density.   

One reason why I use a cheap basic camera     

 

7 minutes ago, TonyOD said:

Informative and exhaustive as ever, @Troy Smith, thank you. If you remember I nabbed your lighter fuel-based enamel wash technique a while back, so I already have a bottle of the stuff. I’ll give it a spin on my next build. 

 

Personally I find if I have an understanding of what things are, and how they work, in a broad context, it really helps,  so knowing, even basically how things behave, in this case,  the heavier, the less volatile and less therefore thicker, so slower paint drying....  or vice versa,  and then experiment based on that.... 

I'm mildly amused by some modellers who seem to thing that the little bottles and jars sold for the specific purposes are blessed by the modelling fairies and not just some mix of chemicals...  

I'm sure some are quite specific, but many are not.... 

eg https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235072094-tamiya-extra-thin-cement-aternatives/

 

 

Admittedly  you may not want  litres of TET,  but you can buy the raw materials off ebay pretty cheaply,  not sure of the shelf life as well.   But does how what I mean about what they are chemically. (ie look at the data sheet)    

 

I did buy 5x1 litre bottles of Isopropyl a while back,  but it's useful stuff to have around the house anyway.     

 

But then someone lateral thinking modeller realised the stuff in the supermarket for floors had some modelling applications....  and then everyone wanted bottles of Kleer...

 

If does flip back the other way... I have subsequently used superglue/talc for little filling jobs on window frames after using it as modelling filler....  

 

Finally, I'm impressed at the detail of the aileron rib tapes.....   Build looking good as well.

 

cheers

T