Mixing Colors....Cannon Black

I don't claim to have made a comprehensive study of the color names in all the available ranges of hobby paint, but off the top of my head I can't recall having bumped into one called "cannon black."  The paint companies often adopt labels like that simply as a marketing ploy.  I don't blame modelers for getting confused - especially in view of the fact that, nowadays, many of the manufacturers mix matches to colors that are given "official" names (generally by various countries' armed forces).  "Dark brown," for instance, is a pretty generic term that can, quite legitimately, mean lots of things to different paint manufacturers.  "Dark earth," on the other hand, was the official name of a camouflage color used by the British Royal Air Force in World War II; when a hobby paint manufacturer puts the name "dark earth" on a jar of paint it's fairly safe to assume the contents will match (or nearly match) the RAF color (which actually isn't very dark - unless you compare it with "light earth"). 

The sailing ship modeler is, perhaps, best advised to ignore those labels and go with his (or her) gut as to what looks right.  Whether the color is associated with the RAF, the USAF, the Japanese navy, or, for that matter, the C&O Railroad doesn't really matter in terms of what the finished model looks like.  Donald McNarry, for instance, mentioned in an article that he was in the habit of using Humbrol "dark earth" to paint the wire running rigging on his wonderful, small-scale ship models.  (For standing rigging he used Humbrol "track color."  Whether that refers to railroad tracks or tank tracks I'm not sure.)

Whups, I should have been a little clearer.  I wasn't talking as a historical reference.  There's an actual color "cannon black", sold by hobby paint manufacturers.  I was wondering what colors made up that specific black paint. 

 Sorry about that JTilley...

Phil

I don't think there's an answer to this question.  Prior to the twentieth century navies (and other military institutions) didn't have the sort of specific definitions of colors that they do now.  Some good research into eitghteenth- and nineteenth-century paint colors has been done in recent years, but the bottom line is that there was no real consistency to them.

There certainly was no color universally labeled "cannon black" - at all times and in all nations.  Iron gun barrels sometimes were left unpainted.  That approach invites rust, of course, so many navies (and private owners) painted their guns with various black concoctions.  Just what color they were depended on the chemical composition of the paint, which undoubtedly varied a great deal from time to time and from place to place - and, for that matter, changed somewhat as it weathered.

One of the nice things about modeling subjects from the relatively distant past is that they give the modeler so much room for individuality.  I can't imagine that anybody's going to pronounce the color of the gun barrels on a model of a seventeenth-, eighteenth-, or nineteenth-century ship "wrong."  Well, if they were painted pink with purple polkadots I'd want to see some evidence.  But my guess is that if you paint them any shade of black you like, few will argue.